Meta is Removing Abortion Advocates’ Accounts Without Warning

This is the fifth installment in a blog series documenting EFF’s findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here .   When the team at Women Help Women signed into Instagram last winter, they were met with a distressing surprise: without warning, Meta had disabled their account. The abortion advocacy  non-profit organization found itself suddenly cut off from its tens of thousands of followers and with limited recourse. Meta claimed Women Help Women had violated its Community Standards on “guns, drugs, and other restricted goods,” but the organization told EFF it uses Instagram only to communicate about safe abortion practices, including sharing educational content and messages aimed at reducing stigma. Eventually, Women Help Women was able to restore its account, but only after launching a public campaign and receiving national news coverage .   Unfortunately, Women Help Women’s experience is not unique. Around a quarter of our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign submissions reported that their entire account or page had been disabled or taken down after sharing abortion information—primarily on Meta platforms. This troubling pattern indicates that the censorship crisis goes beyond content removal. Accounts providing crucial reproductive health information are disappearing, often without warning
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