Irene Breen's company sells pregnancy pillows. In January 2025, Instagram told her it was removing her ads, and a call with Meta revealed the problem: the word "pregnancy."
It took 10 months to get the restrictions lifted, according to BBC News. By then, Breen said, her business had taken a significant financial hit. She also had to scrub the word from her entire website, including the product name and every URL that contained it.
She isn't alone, according to a survey from the campaign group CensHERship. BBC News reports that the group surveyed nearly 200 creators, clinical providers, health brands, charities and educators, and 96% said they had experienced restrictions in some form.
According to FutureFemHealth, the dataset spans 187 respondents in more than 20 countries. Across it, 78% had content flagged as inappropriate, 63% saw restricted reach, 58% had content removed and 45% had an ad rejected. Another 43% reported lost revenue.
One women's health company attributed £2.3 million in lost annual revenue to the removal of ad tracking and targeting tools, even as demand for its services grew by more than 6%, FutureFemHealth reports. Its online awareness fell by 70%.
Fixing it is its own hurdle. Among respondents who rated their experience of resolving issues, 88% were dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied, and 1.2% were satisfied. Twenty-two respondents had made more than 15 attempts to resolve a single issue.
Athena Lamnisos, CEO of gynaecological cancer charity Eve Appeal, told the BBC that the hashtag #vaginalcancer doesn't appear on Instagram. The charity also posted a labeled anatomical diagram of the vulva, with information on checking for changes, lumps and bumps. It was pulled.
The first appeal was denied, but after several weeks the post "suddenly reappeared" behind a sensitivity filter, the BBC reports. Those filters heavily blur a post until users press a button, and are usually reserved for graphic imagery such as nudity or violence.
Lamnisos said it isn't an exaggeration to say that "life-saving health information isn't getting to the people who need it most." She added that the problem has continued despite raising it with Meta.
Deirdre O'Neill, from fertility test company Hertility, told the BBC that a Facebook and Instagram video of a woman with endometriosis was removed and classified as political content. "She doesn't sell our services, she doesn't talk about Hertility, she simply describes her pain," O'Neill said.
Carolina Are, a digital criminologist at the London School of Economics who studies social media moderation of women's content, told the BBC that platforms often use AI to flag posts that might breach their guidelines. That can mean an algorithm misdetecting content and storing that information to repeat "previous mistaken decisions." Platform policies, she said, "tend to be incredibly broad, whereby more often than not, nudity is conflated with sexual activity."
Meta declined to comment on specific cases. It told the BBC that businesses can run ads promoting wellness, sexual health and reproductive products and services, but that there are restrictions to avoid users across countries and cultures having a negative experience. It also said it allows women's health content and is consulting with women's health organizations to improve its systems.
TikTok said certain content can't be promoted on the For You feed, that it's transparent about posts in that category and lets creators know so they can appeal. It added that millions of women share health stories on the platform.
Self-censorship is climbing. The share of respondents who said they self-censor rose from 53% in 2025 to 65% this year, according to the BBC. That includes writing "seggs" instead of "sex," using asterisks or emojis, and avoiding some topics altogether.
CensHERship co-founder Clio Wood told the BBC the trend is damaging because "women's health historically has been surrounded by shame and guilt… and we are just reinforcing [that]."
"It's all very well the policy saying XYZ content is allowed, but if the algorithm is still flagging all of that content and suppressing it, that's where the problem comes in," Wood said.