Abortion groups? 🤔

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TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe.

Seems like someone is paying a lot of money to suppress access to information. Anyone have insight as to how to find out who specifically?

Unfortunately, its their platform and their rules… And not even rules… Their whims.

I dont know why people expect corporations to support anything other than profit. You want free speech? For-profit, non-free platforms aren’t the place to do it

Abortion Groups Say Tech Companies Suppress Posts and Accounts

The groups say they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services.

By Emily Schmall and Sapna Maheshwari

June 11, 2024

TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe.

The groups and women’s health advocates say these examples, all from recent months, show why they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services.

They say the companies’ policies on abortion-related content, including advertisements, have long been opaque. But they say the platforms seem to have been more aggressive about removing or suppressing posts that share information about how to obtain safe and legal procedures since the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And when the platforms do restrict the accounts, the companies can be difficult to contact to learn why.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, an organization dedicated to abolishing abortion, said big technology companies had routinely limited its and other groups’ pro-life speech, suspending accounts and blocking ads with little explanation.

“Transparency is the main point,” said Jane Eklund, a fellow at the human rights group Amnesty International USA, which released a report on Tuesday calling on tech giants to clearly outline and explain their rules around abortion-related content. “Without clear guidelines, it’s difficult to hold them accountable for their actions that could be impacting users or to identify and address any content moderation that affects what people can find online.”

Concerns that some of the tech platforms are suppressing posts about abortion have led to changes in how women and organizations talk about it online. They intentionally misspell the term as “aborshun” or “ab0rti0n,” or replace the “bor” with a boar emoji in hopes of reaching more people.

But that can also make it harder for people to find information, and coded language risks adding stigma to the procedure, experts and content creators say.

“We shouldn’t have to substitute words — we shouldn’t have to censor ourselves,” said Ashley Garcia, a 24-year-old part-time creator, who made two videos promoting Hey Jane last year.

The tech companies did not detail how their moderation of abortion-related content may have changed since 2022, though TikTok said it had not made significant shifts. The companies said the issues with suspensions and flags of Hey Jane, Mayday Health and Aid Access were mistakes that they rectified.

TikTok said accounts can post about abortion. But it has a longstanding policy against advertising abortion services, which it counts as “unsuitable businesses, products or services,” along with plastic surgery and organ transplants. Instagram allows ads for abortion services.

The report released Tuesday from Amnesty International USA included details on how at least six organizations that promote or provide abortion services have had their accounts and posts moderated by Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, and TikTok in the past two years.

For example, TikTok removed videos from the account for Hey Jane, which has 105,000 followers, for promoting “illegal activities and regulated goods” — including one that detailed the states where it operated and how it hoped to expand to other states. That video wasn’t restored.

Last month, Hey Jane struggled for days to determine why TikTok had abruptly banned its account. The tech company eventually reinstated the account; Rebecca Davis, Hey Jane’s head of brand marketing, said TikTok had told her that “the suspension was due to ‘over-moderation’ of their policy surrounding prescription drugs and it should not have been removed.”

“That’s pretty much all they can say — just that it was a mistake and they will try their best to not have it happen again,” Ms. Davis said.

TikTok declined to comment on details about Hey Jane’s experience.

Groups have complained about similar issues on Instagram. Last year, the social network removed a post from Ipas, a nonprofit that promotes abortion rights, that had shared the World Health Organization’s recommended protocol for having a medication abortion. Instagram said at the time that the post

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Honestly amazes me that this isnt common knowledge.

Imagine being part of an organization advocating for the murder of babies and complaining about social media suppression. Such ethical high ground lulz