“There was no understanding for that [the law] would even be enforced in Texas at the time because it was appealed to the Supreme Court,” she says. “So even before this law had really big teeth, they banned the two hashtags of the two most commonly used abortion drugs.”
Rathe, TikTok’s spokesperson, says TikTok never restricted these hashtags, even after the law was passed in Texas.
And while Shakouri and others worry about accurate reproductive health information being removed, research from Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group, found that the platform allowed content that encouraged people to physically block access to abortion clinics in order to stay online. (In September 2022, TikTok released updated community guidelines banning medical misinformation about abortions.)
“Our Community Guidelines prohibit content, including medical disinformation, hate speech, graphic content, and we will remove any content we identify that violates this policy,” Rathe told WIRED.
TikTok is not the only platform where users have seen content about stopping the abortion pill. Last year, WIRED reported that Meta had removed and suppressed content telling people how to access medical abortions. But Jane Eklund, a technology and reproductive rights fellow at Amnesty International, says TikTok is especially crucial for younger people, who make up a significant portion of the platform’s user base.
“For younger users, sometimes they go to TikTok before they go to Google,” she says. “So it’s critical that we keep track of these messages.”
Eklund, who has documented instances of abortion-related content being taken down across platforms, says many organizations and creators focused on providing accurate reproductive health information believe that even if their content isn’t removed completely, it will be “shadow banned.” or have the range limited by the platform’s algorithm. When asked if TikTok prioritizes content around the abortion pill, TikTok’s Rathe told WIRED that the company “does not moderate or remove content based on political sensitivities, and nothing in our moderation practices would discriminate against any creator or community on our platform.” “
To get around alleged platform censorship, Eklund says many TikTok creators and organizations Amnesty works with have alternate accounts in case their main account gets banned. In some videos, creators and activists change the spelling of words like “abortion” by, for example, replacing the letter “o” with the number “0”, in an attempt to circumvent any automated moderation.
“It only stigmatizes the topic if we can’t spell the name of a medical procedure correctly,” she says.
According to Hey Jane’s Davis, this could also mean abortion-related content is harder for users to find. “If we are unable to use best SEO practices, such as repeating search terms in our videos, those videos will not be shown to people searching and trying to find information on that topic, if we change the spelling or using euphemisms,” she says.
Davis says small tweaks, such as allowing organizations to be verified as legitimate healthcare providers on platforms, can help users — and hopefully businesses — determine which sources are credible. (Hey Jane has been verified on TikTok.)
But Reproaction’s Shakouri worries the platform will further censor content as abortion laws tighten across the country.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she says.
