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Some companies that sell abortion pills online have had their accounts suspended on Meta’s Instagram social media platform and their posts on Meta’s Instagram and Facebook deleted.
According The New York Times’ Meta said companies like Aid Access, Just the Pill, Women Help Women and Hey Jane were part of what Meta called “excessive moderation” that included suspending accounts and blurring, deleting or blocking posts. .
Meta told the Times that it reinstated some accounts this week. An abortion pill supplier said its accounts have been hit since November, the Times reported. The vendors also told the newspaper that excessive moderation affecting their accounts and posts has increased over the past two weeks.
Meta told the Times that the problem had to do with its policies on drug supplier content. When asked for comment by CNET, Meta spokesperson Erin Logan reiterated this.
“We prohibit the sale of medicines on our platforms without proper certification and our policies in this area have not changed,” he said. “These groups are experiencing a variety of issues, some due to correct enforcement as well as over-enforcement. But we’ve been pretty clear in recent weeks that we want to allow more expression and reduce errors in enforcement, and we are committed do that.”
Meta also said that the post confusion was a technical issue related to content posted from Facebook to Instagram, and that flagged posts are being restored. Some posts, the company said, did not violate Facebook policies.
Meta’s mishandling of accounts and posts comes when the company changed its strategy and eliminated fact-checking on Facebook in favor of community notes. it is also closer lined up with the new president Donald Trump. But Meta says the moderation of accounts belonging to abortion pill providers is not related to changes to Facebook’s speech policy or other Meta changes.
Meanwhile, Trump has criticized social media companies and on Tuesday issued an executive order targeting what he called government censorship of social platforms. The president and others on the right have accused the Biden administration of suppressing speech on such platforms. In June, however, the The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration in a case alleging that it had overstepped its bounds in its contacts with social media companies. As noted According to NPR, Judge Amy Coney Barrett said in her opinion for the court’s majority that the parties suing the government had offered no evidence to support their claims that the government pressured social media companies to restrict their speech.
Aid Access, one of the affected abortion pill suppliers and, the Times noted, one of the largest abortion pill suppliers in the U.S., has more than 53,000 followers on Instagram and more than 5,000 on Facebook. on an instagram mailThe company said: “We know that some of our posts are still blurred or missing, and we are working hard to fix it.”
