When Irene Breen got a notification in January 2025 that Instagram was removing adverts for her company's pregnancy pillows, she was confused. What was so offensive about a pillow? She was later told on a call with Meta that the problem was the word "pregnancy".
"We had to scrub the word from our entire website… from the product name," Breen said. "We had to remove all our URLs which had pregnancy in them and rename them all." The restrictions were eventually lifted but, she said, it took 10 months of conversations with Instagram's parent company Meta - by which time her business had suffered a significant financial hit. Meta, which also owns Facebook, declined to comment on specific cases, but told the BBC that while businesses can run adverts that promote wellness, sexual health and reproductive products and services, there are restrictions to avoid users across countries and cultures having a negative experience.
It's not just businesses taking out paid adverts who claim their content has been unfairly restricted. Women's health creators and charities have told us their content has been removed, had sensitivity filters added, or had its reach suppressed - a practice known as "shadowbanning". The campaign group CensHERship monitors claims that women's health content is being suppressed.
In a report last month, it surveyed nearly 200 creators, clinical providers, health brands, charities, and educators - 96% of whom said they had experienced restrictions in some form. Sensitivity filters heavily blur posts requiring users to press a button before they can see it and are usually reserved for graphic imagery - including nudity or violence. Dr Carolina Are, a digital criminologist at the London School of Economics who studies social media moderation of women's content, said research shows AI is often used to flag posts that might breach platform guidelines.
But that can mean an "algorithm misdetecting" content, as it is created to do, storing that information to repeat "previous mistaken decisions", she warns. The system often uses automated messages, Are says, which can mean users are then unable to question a decision. Some hashtags just don't appear on Instagram, said Athena Lamnisos, CEO of gynaecological cancer charity Eve Appeal.
"One of the hashtags, unbelievably, was #vaginalcancer." "We put a post on Instagram about vulval anatomy - it was very clearly an anatomical diagram with labels around it, talking about vulval cancer and the need to check for changes, lumps and bumps. It was pulled." The charity appealed, which was initially denied - but after several weeks the post "suddenly reappeared" behind a sensitivity filter. Lamnisos added it wasn't exaggerating to say that "life-saving health information isn't getting to the people who need it most".
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