Join our live discussion on Wednesday, July 6, 1:00-2:00 PM ET.
Facebook and Instagram have begun removing posts related to abortion pills, as posts about such drugs have increased since the Supreme Court’s decision removing constitutional protections for abortion.
Memes and status updates explaining how people can get abortion pills in the mail have exploded on social platforms in recent days.
General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific versions such as mifepristone and misoprostol, spiked Friday morning on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and broadcast TV, according to an analysis by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs. By Sunday, Zignal had counted more than 250,000 such mentions.
Some of the posts demonstrated how people can legally get a medical abortion by mail in the U.S. through telehealth abortion services like Hey Jane, Just the Pill, and Choix in states where such health care is legal.
In other posts, individual users offered to mail prescriptions to women living in states that have criminalized abortion following Friday’s Supreme Court decision.
Meanwhile, underground abortion pill networks have begun to emerge, said Eric Feinberg, a researcher at the Coalition for a Safer Web. Screenshots provided to the Guardian show mifepristone for sale in private Facebook groups with names such as “MTP kit and other pills” and “Cleansing and abortion pills”.
Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of the posts directly offering pills to people, Vice Media first reported Monday.
The Associated Press obtained a screenshot Friday of an Instagram post by a woman who offered to buy or mail abortion pills, minutes after a court ruled to strike down the constitutional right to an abortion.
“Message me if you want to order abortion pills but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the Instagram post reads. Instagram took it down in an instant.
On Monday, an AP reporter tested how Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, would respond to a similar Facebook post, writing: “If you send me your address, I’ll send you abortion pills.” The post was removed within a minute.
The Facebook account was immediately put on “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated standards for “weapons, animals and other regulated goods.”
Yet when the AP reporter made the same post but replaced the words “abortion pills” with “gun,” the post went untouched. A post with the same exact suggestion to send “weed” was also left and is not considered a violation.
In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company has not explained the apparent inconsistencies in the implementation of this policy, including the ongoing problem of guns being openly sold on its platform.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone confirmed in a tweet on Monday that the company will not allow individuals to give away or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform, but will allow content that shares information about how to access pills.
Stone acknowledged some issues with implementing that policy across its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram. “We have found some instances of incorrect implementation and are correcting them,” Stone said in the tweet.
Most US states allow abortion pills to be administered by mail, while 19 prohibit taking such drugs at home without a doctor present. More than half of all abortions in the U.S. are medical abortions, according to the Choice Research Group at the Guttmacher Institute.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday that states should not ban mifepristone, the drug used to induce abortion.
“States cannot ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment regarding its safety and efficacy,” Garland said in a statement Friday.
But some Republicans have already tried to stop their residents from getting abortion pills by mail, with some states like West Virginia and Tennessee banning providers from prescribing the drugs via telemedicine consultation.
Add Comment