'We got penalised for saying 'pregnancy' on Instagram'

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.

CensHERship found the number of respondents self-censoring as a result of shadowbanning had gone up, from 53% in 2025 to 65% this year.

This includes using euphemistic terms such as "seggs" instead of "sex", using asterisks or emojis, and avoiding certain topics altogether.

CensHERship co-founder Clio Wood said this was "really damaging", because "women's health historically has been surrounded by shame and guilt… and we are just reinforcing [that]".

Are told the BBC that platforms' policies "tend to be incredibly broad, whereby more often than not, nudity is conflated with sexual activity".

And this ultimately hurts audiences, Wood said.

"We talk to so many people who say, 'The only reason I found out about my vulval cancer was because Eve Appeal posted about those symptoms, and then I researched it and could ask my doctor the right questions'," she said.

But Wood said that, since starting CensHERship in 2024, she has noticed that social media companies "can see this is something that they need to engage on now.".

"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," she said.

"I think within the platforms those departments are very siloed - so what we would love is for those conversations to be much more holistic."