As the Meta oversight board debates how to proceed with abortion-related content on Facebook and Instagram, Media Matters for America has submitted a public comment asking the company to bolster its content moderation process and issue-specific policies to address rampant abortion misinformation on its platforms.
Meta currently has no community guidelines that speak to abortion-related content specifically. The company’s poor enforcement of its standing policies has allowed right-wing misinformers to continue spreading unfettered falsehoods about abortion and using its platforms to facilitate harassment of abortion patients and providers. As a result, Meta continues to privilege conservative talking points at the cost of suppressing accurate information about abortion — an especially concerning trend as reproductive health access is increasingly restricted in the post-Roe v. Wade era.
New data from Media Matters has shown that abortion-related posts from U.S. news and politics pages on Facebook that receive the most engagement — as measured by reactions, comments, and shares — came from right-leaning groups, often containing harmful and inaccurate messaging. After analyzing nearly 370,000 posts about abortion from January 1, 2021, to June 22, 2023, Media Matters found that right-leaning Facebook pages have dominated the conversation about abortion rights — earning nearly half of total interactions (46%) on abortion-related posts.
To put those numbers into perspective, right-wing pages accounted for only 35% of total abortion-related posts from U.S. news and politics pages. In comparison, left-leaning and nonaligned pages comprised 17% and 48% of all abortion-related posts. However, left-leaning posts only accounted for 30% of engagement, and nonaligned posts accounted for just 24%.
