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“People were looking for information, and we were a trusted source,” Dimitratou said of the organization founded in 2005 by Dr. Rebecca Gompert. “It’s suppressing and denying people who want important information.”
Now, with the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Dimitrat’s experience could serve as a warning to abortion rights groups in the US of what’s to come — if not more.
Dr. Rebecca Gomperts (second from right) founded Women on the Web.
Photo: Charles McQuillan / Getty Images
Even before Dobbs’ decision, Instagram suspended the account of Plan C Pills, a source of early-stage abortion pills, just days before Texas’ abortion ban takes effect in 2021. Since Dobbs’ ruling, Motherboard reports that Meta has automatically banned some people. Facebook has blocked posts related to abortion pills and banned the accounts behind them, NBC News reported on Instagram, which appeared to limit search results for the hashtags “abortion pills” and “mifepristone.”
Meta blames the problems on policies and enforcement related to the purchase, sale, trade and gift of pharmaceuticals.
But it’s not just meta. Since the Dobbs decision leaked in May, Democratic strategists have reported seeing abortion-related ads appearing across Google properties. “We’ve had frequent problems with ads about abortion, especially on Google properties, including YouTube and Search,” said Stephanie Grasmick, CEO of Rising Tide Interactive. “Sometimes ads run for a while and suddenly become disapproved, other times ads appear to be approved but don’t make any sense.”
Evan Greer, director of the advocacy group Fight for the Future, sees these examples as the inevitable result of platforms trying to keep up with rapidly evolving laws in the US. The National Right to Life Committee is pushing a bill that would criminalize the advertising of abortion services and pills. “For-profit technology platforms are fundamentally risk-averse, despite all their hype about moving fast and breaking things,” Greer said. “That’s why we should be as concerned about the power of platforms to stifle speech as they are to amplify them.”
It seems we have no protection. We are so vulnerable, and our voices can be silenced at any moment.
It’s nothing new for Dimitrat, who has spent years trying to navigate America’s tech giants’ complex laws on abortion and constantly appeals their takedown decisions. Women on the World Wide Web’s Facebook page are taken; So the sites are located in Mexico, Malaysia and Singapore. His Facebook ads and organic posts were rejected or removed repeatedly.
“The appeal is often a long process, and a lot of confirmation is required from us to even start the appeal,” she said. “When some of our accounts and posts are backed up, Facebook sometimes says the event is ‘Error.’
Meanwhile, abortion ads on Google aren’t even allowed to run in dozens of countries, including Poland. Even in approved places, Dimitratou, abortion-related ads are often rejected. How women will fare on the web in 2020 after a major Google search overhaul is a no-brainer. “We feel like we have no protection,” Dimitratou said. We are so vulnerable, and our voices can be silenced at any moment.
Abortion-rights groups like Women on the Web, Meta and Google’s content policies are full of landmines — especially with advertising. In Canada, Dimitratu recently posted a Facebook ad titled “Unwanted Pregnancy? We can help. Although abortion is legal in Canada, the ad was disapproved because it violated Meta’s policy on ads that reveal personal characteristics of viewers.
“A lot of ads are like, ‘Are you pregnant?'” said Meta spokesman Danny Lever. You’re rightfully disapproved for using phrases that are in. We allow the word “pregnancy” to be used in ads as long as it doesn’t violate our other guidelines.
When a notice is denied, the appeals process can be slow and tedious. Screenshot: Women on the Web
Google’s rules severely restrict any abortion-related advertiser, including women on the web, from serving nearly half of the world’s ads. Anyone who wants to run ads targeting abortion-related keywords in the US, UK, or Ireland must certify as an organization that does or does not provide abortions — an option that isn’t available to women on the web, anyway, because it’s based in Canada.
Further complicating the issue for women on the web, in all but three countries, Google prohibits the names of prescription drugs — including mifepristone and misoprostol — from appearing in the ad text or on the landing page to which the ad is directed. And ads for abortion services on YouTube have been banned around the world, cutting off a critical platform for abortion rights groups’ digital access.
Women on the web are often rejected or excluded.Screenshot: Women on the Web
“We have clear and long-standing policies governing abortion-related ads on our platform,” spokesman Michael Aciman said. To ensure this, we are committed to helping advertisers comply with our guidelines. People can find clear and helpful information about the services they need.
Despite the platforms’ stated rules, Dimitrou said, it’s not always easy to know what happened, like in April when Instagram removed a post from a woman on Web Arab that it said violated community standards. The text, translated from Arabic, reads: “Abortion should be a private matter.”
In another instance, Facebook banned an ad in Canada that said, “Our trained help desk is doctor-led and offers confidential support 7 days a week in 16 languages.” Facebook rejected it for violating its policy on “unacceptable business practices.”
Facebook has banned several women from online ads.Screenshot: Women on the Web
For a while last year, women on the web were placed in a similar position to Facebook’s trial period in total advertising accounts, where the company imposed restrictions on which advertising tools it could use. Facebook said at the time that “too many ads are hidden and reported” by other users, which led to the ban. “Meta only keeps us trying to scam people, even though our pages are up for a long time,” Dimitratou.
Meta’s Lever says that some mistakenly removed ads and posts have been reinstated and the company no longer faces bans on its ad account. “Earlier this year, we removed restrictions that were mistakenly allowed for women to advertise on the web and restore their Instagram accounts,” Lever said.
Equally puzzling was Dimitratou’s decline in traffic to women’s websites in May 2020, when Google rolled out one of its major updates. “Our traffic has never reached the same level as before the update,” she said.
Google’s Aciman says: “There are various reasons why a particular site may not appear at the top of our results for a particular query. Our systems look at hundreds of signals to match queries with the most relevant and reliable results. A drop in traffic is not necessarily an indication that a website is not ranking highly for relevant searches.
In May 2020, Dimitrat noticed a sudden drop in female traffic on the website.Screenshot: Women on the Web
Regardless of Meta and Google’s reasons, Dimitratou said, the result is that these actions not only deny information to people seeking abortions, but also make women on the site appear to be doing something illegal or illegal. “There’s this reinforced stigma, and people are less likely to have access to important, accurate and reliable information,” Dimitratou said.
Of course, there are reasons why abortion providers and abortion rights groups may face fewer problems in the US than they do abroad. For starters, abortion is not federally prohibited in countries like Poland and Brazil, and in the US Section 230 protects users from liability for what they post. But that shield is under threat, including in states like Texas that have passed restrictive abortion bans. According to Politico, in the past year alone, more than 100 laws have been introduced to regulate how online forums handle user posts.
As states take free speech online and abortion rights offline, Greer said it makes stories like Dimitratu’s possible, not just in America. “As US states pass laws that criminalize not only providing abortions, but talking about them, raising funds and facilitating them, we’re seeing tech platforms become more aggressive in removing abortion-related content,” she says. “When they call, they say, ‘Oops, we made a mistake.'”
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