“There is no understanding that [the law] would even be enforced in Texas at that time because it was appealed to the Supreme Court,” she said. “So even before this law actually went into effect, they banned the two hashtags of the two most commonly used abortion pills.”
Rathe, a spokesperson for TikTok, said that TikTok never restricted these hashtags, even after the Texas law was passed.
And while Shakouri and others worry that accurate reproductive health information is being deleted, study from Media Matters for America, a media monitoring group, found that the platform is allowing content that encourages people to block access to abortion clinics to stay online. (September 2022, TikTok released community guidelines update ban medical misinformation about abortion.)
“Our Community Guidelines prohibit content that includes medical misinformation, hate speech, and objectionable content, and we will remove any content we determine to violate our policies. this policy,” Rathe told WIRED.
TikTok isn’t the only platform where users have seen content about abortion pills taken down. Last year, WIRED reports that Meta removed and blocked content that taught people how to approach medical abortion. But Jane Eklund, technology and reproductive rights fellow at Amnesty International, says TikTok is especially important for young people, who make up a significant proportion of the platform’s user base. .
“For younger users, sometimes they go to TikTok before they go to Google,” she said. “So it is extremely important that we maintain these posts.”
Eklund, who has documented abortion-related content takedowns across platforms, said many organizations and creators focused on providing accurate reproductive health information believe that right away. Even if their content isn’t completely removed, it will either be “shadow banned” or have its reach regulated by the platform’s algorithm. When asked if TikTok would remove content around abortion pills, TikTok’s Rathe told WIRED that the company “does not censor or remove content based on political sensitivities and has nothing to do with the practices.” Our censorship action seeks to discriminate against any creator or community on our platform.”
To avoid platform censorship, Eklund says that many TikTok creators and organizations Amnesty works with have alternate accounts, in case their main account is banned. In some videos, creators and activists will tweak the spellings of words like “abortion” by replacing the letter “o” with the number “0” in an attempt to navigate around any control activities. any automatic browsing.
“It only tarnishes the topic further when we can’t really spell the name of a medical procedure correctly,” she said.
This could also mean that abortion-related content becomes harder to find for users, according to Hey Jane’s Davis. “If we can’t use SEO best practices, such as repeating search terms in our videos, those videos won’t be served to people searching and trying to find information. on that subject, if we change the spelling or use euphemisms,” she said.
Davis says that small tweaks, such as allowing organizations to be verified as legitimate healthcare providers on the platform, could help users—and hopefully companies—verify. determine which source is reliable. (Hey Jane is verified on TikTok.)
But Reproaction’s Shakouri worries that the platform could moderate content further as nationwide abortion laws tighten.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she said.
