When Irene Breen received notice in January 2025 that Instagram would remove ads for her company’s pregnancy pillows, she was confused. She wondered, what was so offensive about a pillow?
She was later told during a call with Instagram parent company Meta that the problem was the word "pregnancy."
"We had to remove the word from the entire website...even from the product names," Brin said.
"All URLs containing the word pregnancy must also be deleted and renamed."
The restrictions were eventually lifted, but she said the entire process took 10 months of back-and-forth with Meta, during which time her company had suffered considerable financial losses.
Meta also owns Facebook. The company declined to comment on individual cases, but told the BBC that although companies can publish advertisements promoting health, sexual health and reproductive health products and services, the platform still has certain restrictions to avoid negative experiences for users from different countries and cultural backgrounds.
Companies running paid ads are not the only ones claiming content is being unfairly restricted.
Multiple women's health content creators and charities told the BBC that their content had been deleted, labeled as sensitive content filtering, or had its reach restricted, commonly known as "shadow banning".
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The advocacy group "CensHERship" specializes in tracking cases related to the suppression of women's health content.
A report released by the organization last month surveyed nearly 200 content creators, medical service providers, wellness brands, charities and educators, and 96% said they had encountered content restrictions in some form.
Sensitivity filters require users to press a button to remove the blurring effect before viewing relevant posts, and are usually only used for explicit images such as nudity or violence.
Dr Carolina Are, a digital criminologist at the London School of Economics who studies how women's content is moderated on social media platforms, said research shows that platforms often use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically flag content that may violate community standards.
But she warned that this could lead to algorithms "misjudging content." Since the system inherently operates through past case studies, erroneous judgments may be recorded and "previously erroneous decisions" may be repeated in the future.
Arley said such systems often respond with automated messages, making it difficult for users to further question or appeal decisions.
"Life-saving health information"
Athena Lamnisos, chief executive of gynecological cancer charity Eve Appeal, said some tags simply didn't work properly on Instagram.
"It's unbelievable that one of the hashtags is #vaginalcancer," she said.
She added: “We did an Instagram post about the anatomy of the vulva, which was a very clear diagram of the anatomy with the various parts labeled, explaining vulvar cancer and alerting people to changes, lumps and bumps.”
"As a result, the post was removed."
The charity appealed but this was initially dismissed. However, a few weeks later, the post "suddenly reappeared" with a sensitive content filtering label added.
Ramnissos added that it is no exaggeration to say that "life-saving health information may not reach those who need it most."
She said that even after reporting the issue to Meta, the situation continues to this day.
"Like an obstacle course"
Deirdre O'Neill from fertility testing company Hertility said companies were experiencing similar problems. A video posted on Facebook and Instagram of a woman living with endometriosis recounting her experience has been censored.
"She wasn't promoting our services, she wasn't talking about Hertility, she was just talking about her own experience with pain," O'Neill said.
However, she said the video was eventually removed by Meta and classified as political content.
When asked about the Eve Appeal and Hertility cases, Meta did not respond specifically to individual cases, but said its platform allows women's health-related content and is working with women's health organizations to improve related systems.
O'Neill added that trying to advertise on TikTok has also become "like an obstacle course."
"It takes a lot of resources to publish something, but in the end it's often not worth the time because almost everything gets appealed, flagged, and removed," she said.
TikTok said that while some content cannot be promoted through the "For You" recommendation page (For You feed), the platform will clearly indicate which posts fall into this category and notify creators so that they can file complaints.
TikTok added that millions of women share their personal health-related experiences on the platform, including posting content using hashtags such as #Period and #Endometriosis.
self-censorship
CensHERship found that the proportion of respondents who choose to self-censor due to "shadow blockade" has increased from 53% in 2025 to 65% this year.
This includes using euphemisms such as "seggs" instead of "sex," using asterisks or emojis instead of sensitive words, and simply avoiding certain topics.
Clio Wood, co-founder of CensHERship, said the situation is "extremely hurtful" because "women's health issues have long been surrounded by shame and guilt... and we are actually reinforcing this phenomenon."
Digital criminologist Alley told the BBC that social platform policies "are often very broadly defined, so often nudity is directly equated with sexual content."
