Insta, FB remove posts that offer access to abortion pills

CHENNAI: Facebook and Instagram have started to remove posts that offer abortion drugs to women who might not be able to acquire them, following the Supreme Court’s decision on overturning abortion rights. Such social media posts were purportedly meant to aid women in the States before the abortion rights were prohibited.

Facebook and Instagram started eliminating some of these postings almost instantly. Research by the media intelligence company Zignal Labs found that mentions of abortion pills in general, as well as posts citing particular varieties like mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly increased Friday morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and TV broadcasts. Zignal had tallied almost 250,000 such mentions by Sunday.

Posts discussing abortion medication were being removed by Meta, the company that owns both Facebook and Instagram, revealed Vice Media. By posting on Facebook on Monday, "If you provide me your address, I will deliver you abortion pills," an AP reporter tested how the business might react to a similar request. Within a minute, the post had been deleted.

Since the message violates Facebook's policies against "guns, animals, and other regulated items," the account was instantly placed on "warning" status. However, when the reporter made a similar same post but substituted "a gun" for "abortion drugs," the message was left unaltered.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, said in a tweet on Monday that the company will not permit users to give or sell medicines on its platform, but will permit content that provides directions for getting medications. Stone recognised that enforcing that policy across all of its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, has some issues. “We’ve discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these,” Stone said in the tweet.

Republicans, however, have already made effort to block their residents from receiving abortion pills through the mail. States like West Virginia and Tennessee restrict physicians from providing the drug via telemedicine consultation.