Meta shuts down page dedicated to tracking the murder of women in Australia

A leading anti-violence campaigner has accused Meta of censorship after the tech giant shut down her social media account that tracks women murdered in Australia.

Researcher and journalist Sherele Moody is calling for her Australian Femicide Watch page on Instagram to be reinstated, after the platform claimed she had breached its community standards, without specifying which content was outside its guidelines.

“Why is talking about women’s safety so offensive?” Moody said on Thursday.

Femicide Watch counts every woman killed in Australia, and has become an important resource for advocates because governments do not publish real-time data. The project reported earlier this week the number of women killed this year reached 61, after Victorian woman Baljit Kaur was allegedly stabbed to death.

As the federal government takes on big tech with its Digital Duty of Care – and sparked a debate about free speech in Australia – Moody questioned why her advocacy was being hampered but no one was held accountable for the rape and death threats she regularly received online.

“I’ve reported ... comments and posts and messages where people have made threats to end my life, and Meta has ruled them not against community standards,” she said.

“However, women talking about violence against women are being censored, and our conversations are being removed.”

Moody has been campaigning against violence against women for more than a decade, organising rallies, creating the popular She Matters mural in Melbourne, and has criticised the prime minister for dismissing her call for a royal commission into femicide – the petition for which has hit nearly 180,000 signatures.

A campaign to reinstate Moody’s account is mobilising online, with advocacy groups including Change.org, which hosts the royal commission petition, and GetUp swinging in behind her.

Minister for Social Services Tanya Plibersek said on Thursday that Moody did important work raising awareness about domestic and sexual violence in Australia.

“The tech bros should be focusing on cracking down on the filth being force-fed to our kids online, not silencing advocates,” she said.

Community Strong MP Zali Steggall called for the page to be reinstated, saying documenting the murder of Australian women and children was a vital public service.

“What is a real breach of community standards is the violence perpetrated against women and children and the continued lack of effective government action,” she said.

Moody said she appealed against the decision on Sunday when she was notified her account was closed. She said she had not received a response from Meta, Instagram’s parent company, which notified her the account would be permanently disabled if found to violate Meta’s community standards.

The platform polices violent threats and sexualised content, but says it does not “prohibit threats when shared in awareness-raising or condemning context”.

Moody said her posts did not glorify violence nor sexualise people, but called out misogyny. She said she had been repeatedly subjected to campaigns to remove her content.

“It’s just unbelievable that a page that exists to keep women alive is removed because it’s caused offence to, I don’t know, AI or some random crew of people who’ve reported it,” she said.

“There’s a guy who’s been convicted of child sex abuse, who’s been reporting my posts as breaching copyright, and Meta’s allowed those reports to stand and has removed the material.”