Facebook and Instagram have begun removing posts related to abortion pills, as posts about such drugs have increased following the Supreme Court ruling that removes constitutional protection for abortion. Memes and status updates explaining how people can get abortion pills by post have exploded on social media in recent days. General reports of abortion pills, as well as posts reporting specific releases such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly rose on Friday morning on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV shows, according to an analysis by information company Zignal Labs. As of Sunday, Zignal had counted more than 250,000 such reports. Some of the posts showed how people can legally receive medical abortion by mail across the US, through abortion online telegram services such as Hey Jane, Just the Pill and Choix in states where healthcare is legal. In other posts, individual users have offered to post prescriptions to women living in states criminalizing abortion following Friday’s Supreme Court ruling. Meanwhile, underground networks of abortion pills have begun to emerge, said Eric Feinberg, a researcher at the Coalition for a Safe Web. Snapshots provided to the Guardian showed Mifepristone for sale to private Facebook groups under names such as “MTP Kit and Other Pills” and “Cleansing and Elimination Pills”. Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of the posts that offered pills directly to people, Vice Media first reported on Monday. The Associated Press received a screenshot of an Instagram post from a woman who offered to buy or promote abortion pills by mail, minutes after the court ruled to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. “Send me send me if you want to order abortion pills, but you want them to be sent to my address instead of yours,” the Instagram post read. Instagram crashed it in minutes. On Monday, an AP reporter tested how Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will send you abortion pills.” The post was removed within a minute. The Facebook account was immediately put on “alert” status for the post, which said it violated its standards for “weapons, animals and other controlled goods”. However, when the AP reporter made the exact same post, but exchanged the words “abortion pills” for “gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the exact same “weed” mail quote was also left on and was not considered a violation. In an email, a Meta spokesman noted the company’s policies banning the sale of certain items, including weapons, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent discrepancies in enforcing this policy, including the ongoing issue of weapons being sold openly on its platform. A Meta spokesman, Andy Stone, tweeted on Monday that the company would not allow people to donate or sell drugs on its platform, but would allow content that shares information about how to access pills. Stone has identified some issues with enforcing this policy across all of its platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. “We have identified some cases of misconduct and are correcting them,” Stone tweeted. Most states in the United States allow abortion pills by mail order, while 19 prohibit taking such drugs at home without the presence of a doctor. More than half of all abortions in the United States are medical abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday that states should not ban mifepristone, the drug used to induce abortion. “States are not allowed to ban mifepristone based on disagreement with FDA experts’ judgment about its safety and efficacy,” Garland said in a statement Friday. However, some Republicans have already tried to prevent residents from taking abortion pills by mail, with some states such as West Virginia and Tennessee barring providers from prescribing the drug over telemedicine.
