On May 3, shortly after the draft US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, Bleu Grano noticed something strange. Grano, who runs the Instagram account Fund Abortion Not Police, had posted a guide to abortion services, including information about how to obtain abortion pills by mail, and images with web addresses to organizations like Aid Access and PlanC. The post was removed for violating Instagram’s community guidelines on the “sale of illegal or regulated goods.”

“I got really stressed that they were going to suspend the account,” says Grano. “I started to think it was specific to abortion, and stopped using the word ‘pills’ and only said ‘abortion by mail.’”

In the days since the final Supreme Court decision overturning Roe was issued, big tech companies have largely been tight-lipped about how they will respond to the ruling, beyond promising support for their own employees. But on June 27, NBC reported that Meta was restricting some search results for the terms “abortion” and the drug “mifepristone,” one of two drugs commonly used to induce a medical abortion. Motherboard found that posts similar to Grano’s were removed for violating Meta’s policies that restrict the sale of illegal or controlled substances on the company’s platforms.

Those reports led to and sometimes included speculation that Meta had changed its policies after Roe was overturned to crack down on abortion-related content. However, Meta denies changing its policies after the decision—and pro-choice activists say that the censorship has been going on for years. Activists who spoke to WIRED say they have seen the company’s AI moderation system tag abortion content, in many cases about abortion pills, as “sensitive,” decrease its visibility, or remove it altogether.

Jessica Ensley, digital outreach and opposition research director at Reproaction, a nonprofit that supports access to abortions, told WIRED that examples of content being removed since the overturning of Roe are only the most recent—and noticeable—of a longer-running trend of abortion-related content being censored on Meta’s platforms.

“We have been seeing social media platforms, specifically Meta, suppressing abortion content for quite a while now,” Ensley says. She recalls a post on Reproaction’s Instagram account from September 2021 discussing World Health Organization protocols for self-managed abortion using medication. A month later, in October, Ensley noticed the content had been removed and Reproaction’s Instagram account had a flag on it, “notifying us that if we ever wanted to monetize, this would be a strike against us,” she says.

The abortion-related content that people have noticed being removed from Meta’s platforms since the Supreme Court decision “is the same stuff” as before, says a volunteer content moderator for a large private Facebook group for American women seeking support and information on abortions. The moderator, who has been a part of the group for four years and a moderator for more than two, asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy. “Right now, there's just a much higher volume of people posting these things.”

She called the recent removals “totally precedented,” saying that Facebook removed posts and links related to abortion pills from her group for years. In order to keep the group from getting shut down or flagged by Facebook, the moderator says she enforces strict rules, including not allowing members to post links, to keep the group out of the company’s crosshairs.

“What’s wild is that you don't know where the line is,” she says. “Every single post has to be seen by a moderator, because we don't want people posting requests for pills, to request or to send pills, because that will get the entire group taken down.”

The moderator says that on Reddit, where she also moderates an abortion subreddit, there are similar rules about not selling or buying pills on the platform, but that content and links discussing them are not removed by the platform, and do not put the group at risk.

Activists and organizers who spoke to WIRED say that other platforms are known to censor abortion-related content too. Ensley says Twitter removed one of Reproaction’s tweets about the abortion pill this year. TikTok has been accused by some users of taking down videos about abortion, although company spokesperson Jamie Favazza says the service’s policies do not prohibit content related to abortions or abortion access, only medical misinformation and other violations of its Community Guidelines.

The scale of Meta’s platforms makes its moderation of abortion content particularly influential. Jennifer Johnsen, vice president of digital programs and education at Power to Decide, told WIRED that the Instagram page for the company’s Abortion Finder tool was removed suddenly on June 26, after operating for nearly two years without incident.

“We were told an AI bot flagged it,” Johnsen says. The page has since been reinstated, but Johnsen worries that the removal of such broad swathes of content will ultimately harm women looking for reliable information. “Social media is a vital way that the abortion care community talks with abortion seekers and gets information out.”

Johnsen’s experience is common in the pro-choice activist community. Most of the people who spoke to WIRED say their content appeared to have been removed automatically by AI, rather than being reported by another user.

Activists also worry that even if content is not removed entirely, its reach might be limited by the platform’s AI.

While it’s nearly impossible for users to discern how Meta’s AI moderation is being implemented on their content, last year the company announced it would be deemphasizing political and news content in users’ News Feed. Meta did not respond to questions about whether abortion-related content is categorized as political content.

Just as the different abortion activists who spoke to WIRED experienced varying degrees of moderation on Meta’s platform, so too did users in different locations around the world. WIRED experimented with posting the same phrase, “Abortion pills are available by mail,” from Facebook and Instagram accounts in the UK, US, Singapore, and the Philippines in English, Spanish, and Tagalog. Instagram removed English posts of the phrase when posted from the US, where abortion was newly restricted in some states after last week’s court decision, and the Philippines, where it is illegal. But a post made from the US written in Spanish and a post made from the Philippines in Tagalog both stayed up.

The phrase remained up on both Facebook and Instagram when posted in English from the UK. When posted in English from Singapore, where abortion is legal and widely accessible, the phrase remained up on Instagram but was flagged on Facebook.

Ensley told WIRED that Reproaction’s Instagram campaigns on abortion access in Spanish and Polish were both very successful and saw none of the issues that the group’s English-language content has faced.

“Meta, in particular, relies pretty heavily on automated systems that are extremely sensitive in English and less sensitive in other languages,” says Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and advocacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

WIRED also tested Meta’s moderation with a Schedule 1 substance that is legal for recreational use in 19 states and for medicinal use in 37 states, sharing the phrase “Marijuana is available by mail” on Facebook in English from the US. The post was not flagged.

“Content moderation with AI and machine learning takes a long time to set up and a lot of effort to maintain,” says a former Meta employee familiar with the organization’s content moderation practices, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “As circumstances change, you need to change the model, but that takes time and effort. So when the world is changing quickly, those algorithms are often not operating at their best, and may enforce with less accuracy during periods of intense change.”

However, Trendacosta worries that law enforcement could flag content for removal as well. In Meta’s 2020 transparency report, the company noted that it had “restricted access to 12 items in the United States reported by various state Attorney Generals related to the promotion and sale of regulated goods and services, and to 15 items reported by the US Attorney General as allegedly engaged in price gouging.” All the posts were later reinstated. “The states' attorneys general being able to just say to Facebook, ‘Take this stuff down,’ and Facebook doing it, even if they ultimately put it back up, that's incredibly dangerous,” Trendacosta says.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told WIRED that the company had not changed its moderation policies in response to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and he said the company was working on a fix. In response to the Motherboard article about moderation of abortion-related content, he tweeted that Meta does not allow content attempting to “buy, sell, trade, gift, request or donate pharmaceuticals,” but does permit posts discussing the “affordability and accessibility” of prescription medication. He added, “We've discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these.” On June 28, Instagram publicly acknowledged that sensitivity screens had been added to several abortion posts, calling it a “bug” and saying the platform was in the process of fixing it.

Meta spokesperson Dani Lever did not address questions from WIRED about whether the company would be investing in more human moderators to work on abortion-related content, or if it applied the same standards to this content in different countries. Lever did confirm that Meta has since fixed the issues with posts on Instagram being flagged and removed.

The confusion over Meta’s handling of abortion-related content has made some activists reflect on the downsides of society becoming reliant on one company’s online social platforms. “For progressives, Facebook was about creating your own community and being able to organize, when I first started back in 2007,” says Robin Marty, author of the New Handbook for a Post-Roe America and operations director at the West Alabama Women’s Center. “That was a specific place where we all met up to organize online. And so the very tools that we were given and we've been using for over a decade in order to make this work happen, now they're being taken from us.”