Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills
Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts from people offering to mail abortion pills to women who need them.
On Friday, the US Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that guaranteed abortion rights. In response, people took to social media, offering to mail abortion pills to women living in states that now banned the procedure.
Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts and banning the accounts posting them, as reported by AP and Vice.
On Monday, an AP reporter tested this by posting ‘If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills’ and the post was removed within one minute.
The Facebook account was immediately put on a ‘warning’ status for violating its standards on ‘guns, animals and other regulated goods.’
Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words ‘abortion pills’ for ‘a gun’ or ‘weed’, the post remained in tact and not considered a violation.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed in a tweet that the posts offering abortion pills violated Meta’s policy against allowing individuals to gift or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform.
‘Content that discusses the affordability and accessibility of prescription medication is allowed. We’ve discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these,’ tweeted Stone.
In contrast, posts containing misinformation by pro-life groups have not been taken down despite people reporting them.
Meta pointed to the same statement when asked how it was planning to handle the complexities of content moderation in the aftermath of Roe v Wade being overturned in the US.
Meanwhile, the company’s policy ‘allows firearm shops and online retailers to promote items available for sale’ off its services and allows discussions about sales of firearms and firearm parts in shops or by online retailers while ‘advocating for changes to firearm regulation’.
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