Advocates say online erasure of women's health is 'dangerous'

Google, Meta, others accused of blocking health content.

London: Tech giants Amazon, Google, TikTok and Meta are suppressing women's health content on their platforms, charities and businesses say, worried the erasure is entrenching a rollback of diversity policies and reproductive rights.

From women's health start-ups to reproductive healthcare groups, many say their social media posts are being censored, online paid advertisements rejected and digital accounts suspended.

"We're not saying that online safety does not matter," said Clio Wood, co-founder of UK-based group CensHERship which launched a campaign last week urging the European Commission to probe the online suppression.

"What we are saying is there is an issue, because the algorithms don't distinguish between explicit content and legitimate women's health educational content. It might be talking about the same body part, but it's doing it in very different ways," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

‘Dangerous place to be’

Content with words like abortion, breast and vagina or that deals with menstrual or sexual health was more likely to be flagged as sexually explicit and removed, according to a recent report by U.S. advocacy group Center for Intimacy Justice.

In a global survey of nearly 160 women's health businesses and charities, more than 60% had posts removed by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and more than a third had their accounts suspended on Amazon.

More than half of the respondents, which included menopausal health businesses or sexual education groups, had content removed by TikTok, and nearly 70% had advertisements rejected by Google, the February report said.

In comparison, posts and advertisements using sexual innuendo and explicit images to promote men's sexual health products were allowed across the platforms, the report added.

Tess Cosad, co-founder of Bea Fertility, said her at-home insemination product business was blocked from using the word vagina in an Amazon showcase page but was able to include semen.

An Amazon spokesperson said in emailed comments the company encouraged sellers to contact the support team if they believed an error in classification had occurred and it has a "robust appeals process in place."

Cosad said she toyed with the idea of using "birth canal" instead but eventually left Amazon altogether.

"We have to be able to use medical terminology," she said. "If we have words we're not allowed to use, that's erasure. The workarounds are so loaded but that's the beginnings of the true censorship. That's the beginning of a very dangerous place to be."

Rights rollback

The report comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is terminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives throughout federal government, and major global companies, including Meta and Amazon, wind down their own programmes.

Trump in January also restored U.S. participation in two international anti-abortion pacts, including one that cuts off U.S. family planning funds for foreign organisations that provide abortion services.

The United Nations earlier this month warned that "women's bodies have become political battlegrounds," and rights advocates fear further setbacks.

Mikayla Dawson, a senior social media strategist at the U.S-based Physicians for Reproductive Health, said her group's visibility on Facebook and Instagram has dropped significantly since the start of the year.

"It's well-known in social media that Meta prides itself on being a 'family-friendly' platform and has used this framework to justify suppressing content they deem political," Dawson said in emailed comments.

Meta did not respond to requests for comment.

"If anti-science sentiments and outright lies get more support from Big Tech than our content, it will have a potentially dangerous impact on people's real lives," Dawson said.

Search engine giant Google was criticised in 2022 when people seeking abortions were instead directed to "crisis pregnancy centres," which steer woman away from the procedure.

Plan C, a group which explains how people can access abortion pills in the United States, said it has been banned from advertising on Google for years and its accounts on Meta and video-sharing platform TikTok are regularly taken down.

"Suppressions keep happening to us so we have to go through lengthy appeals again and again," said the group's digital strategist Martha Dimitratou in a phone interview.

In a statement, Google said it encouraged groups to appeal if they disagree with rejections of their paid ads.

"We have long allowed ads for a variety of sexual health products and services, and recently updated our policies to allow for even more products," it said.

TikTok said its community guidelines applied to "everyone and everything," and content creators are able to appeal decisions.

Alternate words

Campaigners say community moderators and algorithms are not trained in the nuances of women's health, often leading people to use alternate words, which can perpetuate stigma.

Fatma Ibrahim, founder of The Sex Talk Arabic, which raises awareness on gender violence in the Arab world, said its Facebook and Instagram content is intentionally "radical" to break taboos, but can often lead to critics reporting them to moderators, resulting in suspensions and censorship of posts.

"Online is the only space where we can do such work. We use social media platforms because we want to normalise the talk around these things," she said in a video interview.

Dutch charity Neighborhood Feminists, which helps people who cannot afford menstrual products, said it noticed a drop in online engagement over the past year on Instagram and believes it was due to the direct way it describes menstruation.

"We refuse to move towards using euphemisms because that completely reinforces the shame and the stigma that we're pushing back against," said co-founder Tammy Sheldon