Meta announces it will 'dramatically reduce censorship' on Facebook and Instagram - but could health misinformation soar?
Women's health content is often suppressed
Social media giant Meta has announced big changes to how it moderates it content - which may have implications for the ongoing censorship of women’s health content on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
In a video released today (Tuesday 7 January), Mark Zuckerberg says that Meta intends to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”
Meta admits that the current filters used to scan for policy violations “make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't." Instead, filters will focus only on tackling illegal and high severity violations. For others, Meta will rely on someone reporting an issue before it takes action.
The censorship of women’s health content
Research by the campaign CensHERship - which is co-founded by FutureFemHealth - has found women’s health content is regularly taken down on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Instead, it is labelled as pornographic because it uses anatomical terms such as ‘vagina’ and ‘breast.’
In a 2024 survey of 54 organisations and creators, nine out of 10 accounts which shared women’s health content said they experienced some form of censorship in the last 12 months. Nearly 40% of respondents had experienced 10 or more separate issues of censorship.
Examples of content censored include advice on how to identify symptoms of cancer, breast exam tips and facts about menstruation. One respondent revealed that a breast cancer awareness campaign resorted to showing a male nipple instead of a female one to avoid censorship.
In the Meta video, Mark Zuckerberg said that the new changes to filters will now require much higher confidence before content is taken down.
“The reality is that this is a trade-off. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
“The bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focused primarily on removing content, it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems and getting back to our roots about giving people voice.”
Health misinformation on the rise?
In the same video, Meta also announced that it will ‘get rid’ of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.
With an estimated one third (33%) of gen Z alone using social media to discuss illness, social media is increasingly a go-to source for health information.
YouTube has approached health information by introducing an accreditation system for credible health sources — a health ‘shelf’.
However there are fears that Meta’s announcement could mean a rapid rise in health misinformation spreading on Instagram and Facebook.