This type of content falls into a gray area in many social media platforms’ policies on how to handle misinformation – one where definitive research is non-existent and the level of risk is unclear. As a result, they are trying to find the right approach and sometimes allow abortion change content, even as they block posts on how to get medication abortions.
It’s a difficult situation that highlights the unique challenges facing companies from Facebook to Twitter to YouTube as they try to reduce misinformation about abortion on their sites without wading into a highly politicized debate.
Disinformation researchers say the rise of abortion kickback content appears to be sowing doubt and confusion online, muddying the waters about the effectiveness of medication abortions, which pregnant women can still get through the mail even in states that have banned them. the procedure.
“Disinformation and misinformation are really designed to confuse you in that situation and make it more about ideological arguments and conspiracies in a way to cloud your judgment about how easy or safe it is to get an abortion. ,” said Rachel Moran, a Ph.D. researcher at Washington University’s School of Information who studies health misinformation.
Posts claim these abortion reversal treatments – which involve giving an individual progesterone after taking the first pill (mifepristone) in two-pill medication miscarriage treatment – will stop the miscarriage. Websites and hotlines advertising abortion reversal said progesterone is given as a pill, although it has been researched as an injection. Mifepristone blocks the flow of progesterone needed to support a pregnancy, and misoprostol causes cramps that expel biological tissue.
The National Right to Life Committee — one of the largest anti-abortion rights groups — stands behind the alleged treatment and says women deserve to know it’s an option.
But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading organization of reproductive health doctors, has said the reverse treatment is not supported by science and can cause dangerous bleeding. And a 2019 trial evaluating reversal abortion treatment with progesterone ended early because three participants experienced high levels of internal bleeding.
Dr. Mary Jacobson, chief medical officer of Alpha Medical, a women’s health telemedicine group that is in the process of adding medication abortion as a service, called progesterone treatment “an unproven and unethical idea that suggests an oversimplification of complexity.” the hormonal and neurochemical processes of a medical abortion can be manipulated.”
However, to date, federal health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have not weighed in on the safety or efficacy of administering progesterone as a way to reverse medication abortion, making it more challenging. for platforms. to navigate the misinformation without an authoritative federal voice to cite. An FDA spokesman said it has not approved any abortion pill products.
The contents of the abortion pill are just a subset of the misinformation spreading online as debates about Dobbs The decision is spreading on social media. Other false content from anti-abortion groups includes posts saying FDA-approved abortion drugs cause cancer and infertility, even though medication abortion has been proven to be safer than Tylenol. And on the abortion rights side, individuals are spreading misinformation about herbal home remedies to induce abortion, which can be potentially poisonous.
In general, the larger platforms have removed more content about potentially dangerous herbal treatments from abortion rights groups and less content about anti-abortion treatments from anti-abortion groups, said Jenna Sherman, a program manager at Meedan’s Digital Health Lab, a global non-tech. -profit focused on health misinformation research.
“It’s great that any posts about natural abortion remedies are being moderated, but it’s troubling that they are over-moderated compared to the anti-choice rhetoric, which is also very damaging,” she said.
The biggest social media platforms have taken otherwise approach to moderate the onslaught of regrets about abortion. ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube have created new policies to specifically combat content promoting unsafe abortion procedures and false claims about abortion treatments.
TikTok’s medical misinformation policy prohibits content that can cause physical harm, including abortion modification and herbal abortion content, said spokesperson Jamie Favazza. But implementation has been uneven. POLITICO identified videos promoting abortion hotlines and purported testimonials of anti-abortion treatment and showed them on TikTok, which later removed them because they violated its policies, Favazza said.
The company had blocked all content related to searches for “herbal abortion” earlier this year, and in August blocked searches related to the search terms “abortion pill reversal” and “abortion pill” after POLITICO identified videos on this topic. However, the search term “abortion reversal” is still unblocked because it also includes content related to reversal Roe v. Wade, Favazza said. However, the results also include videos promoting abortion pill content, which TikTok removed after POLITICO flagged them.
YouTube started removal of videos in July that provided instructions for unsafe abortions or promoted false claims about the safety of abortion under its medical misinformation policies. They include videos that falsely claim abortion leads to cancer or infertility. It also bans videos selling over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, which would include abortion pills. And YouTube added “context tags” for abort content related to the description of abortion from the National Library of Medicine.
However, YouTube allows general discussion of abortion reversal treatments. Spokeswoman Ivy Choi said the company will ask the CDC, NIH and WHO if they set guidelines for such purported treatments. YouTube has also added tags to posts by crisis pregnancy centers — which advise pregnant women against abortion and sometimes push abortion pills — to note that they do not provide abortions.
Twitter allows discussion of abortion — including back-to-abortion content — but I’m using it Twitter Moments AND Events pages to promote authoritative information and disseminate misleading narratives, spokeswoman Elizabeth Busby said.
meta, The parent company of Facebook and Instagram bans the promotion of medical misinformation if it is found to cause harm, along with the sale of pharmaceutical drugs. Ads promoting prescription drugs also require prior approval (including those that cause abortions) and must come from verified pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies or telehealth providers.
However, two ads promoting an anti-abortion pill hotline from anti-abortion groups were active on Facebook as on Friday afternoon. A Facebook spokesperson said the ads were allowed because they did not mention a pharmaceutical drug – such as progesterone – by name. Meanwhile, Plan C, an advocacy organization that provides resources for medication abortion, showed POLITICO multiple ads on how to get medication abortion pills that Facebook rejected. The Facebook spokesperson said the ads were blocked because the landing page on the websites in the ads listed pharmaceutical abortion drugs by name.
Part of the rise in online content to reverse abortion can be linked to efforts by abortion rights groups to debunk it.
People’s engagement with all kinds of abortion posts on social media platforms tends to increase as new abortion restrictions come into effect, said Rachel Muller Heyndyk, a senior fact checker at UK-based Logically.ai. United. As the conversation gathers momentum, content from anti-abortion groups promoting the abortion pill is included.
“The more we engage with it, even if it’s to criticize it, the more we’ll see it in our feed,” Muller Heyndyk said. She said that because Facebook isn’t deciding whether abortion-reversal content is dangerous or not, “it’s inadvertently rewarding those sites.”
For example, in the week after Texas’ six-week abortion ban went into effect last September, there were 170,000 interactions on anti-abortion pill content on Facebook compared with less than 200 interactions a month earlier, according to CrowdTangle data.
If social media companies are waiting for more guidance from the federal government on how to handle information about abortion cancellation procedures, it could be a while.
While FDA chief Robert Califf has promised to make tackling health misinformation a priority, the agency has so far put more resources into fighting lies about Covid-19 and monkeypox. The agency launched a new website in early August called “Rumor Control” that addresses these two ailments but does not address abortion misinformation.
