Platforms That Can't Stop Harassment Have Somehow Mastered Censoring Women's Health

The internet has no shortage of genuinely harmful content. Harassment campaigns, health misinformation, fake accounts built to sexualize women without their consent – all of it flows through social media with remarkable ease. Yet Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google have apparently found the hill they're willing to die on: women’s health.

Medically accurate, non-sexual posts about periods, menopause, fertility, and postpartum recovery are being flagged as adult content, removed without explanation, and shadowbanned into irrelevance. The platforms that can't seem to moderate actual abuse have become very efficient at silencing doctors.

Now, having reached their limit, over 600 women's health leaders, founders, medical professionals, charity heads, educators, and campaigners signed an open letter organized by CensHERship demanding social media platforms stop treating women's health content as inherently sexual.

The letter, backed by a newly published whitepaper and formal written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament, describes a systemic failure that the signatories say is not just economically damaging but, in some cases, fatal.

When "Period" Triggers the Algorithm but Harassment Doesn't

The mechanics of this censorship are almost comically absurd, until you remember what's actually at stake. CensHERship's research found that 95% of women's health creators experienced censorship in the past year. Nearly 4 in 10 had it happen ten or more times.

Advertising campaigns get rejected, educational posts disappear, and reach gets throttled with no explanation and no meaningful route to appeal. One respondent described a breast cancer awareness campaign that resorted to showing a male nipple instead of a female one just to get past the automated filters.

The parliamentary written evidence submitted by CensHERship documents exactly how deep this runs: 9 in 10 organizations surveyed experienced censorship across multiple platforms in the past twelve months. Platforms including Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google were all named for repeated suppression, often triggered by anatomical terms that are standard medical vocabulary.

More than half of creators now self-censor their language to avoid takedowns, replacing clinical terms with euphemisms, bleeping words in speech, or spelling things out with symbols. And the reason for this? Well, it’s really quite simple: These systems were built on male-default assumptions, trained on male-dominant data, and maintained by organizations with little incentive to fix what they've never treated as a problem.

Why the Stakes Go Far Beyond a Deleted Post

The human cost of this isn't abstract. Dr. Aziza Sesay, a medical doctor and broadcaster who signed the letter, put it plainly: women are dying of embarrassment. They're not coming forward about symptoms because shame and stigma surrounding their bodies are so deeply embedded that even seeking information feels transgressive.

When platforms delete educational content about ovarian cancer symptoms or flag fertility advice as obscene, they're not making a neutral moderation call. The only thing they’re doing is reinforcing the message that women's bodies are something to be hidden.

The economic damage is just as real. McKinsey and the World Economic Forum have estimated that closing the women's health gap could unlock $1 trillion in annual global economic value. The femtech companies and female-led charities building toward that future are being kneecapped by the same moderation systems that let misogynistic content through unchecked.

CensHERship and The Case for Her filed formal complaints under the EU Digital Services Act in March 2025, documenting biased moderation, a lack of transparency, and broken appeals processes on behalf of six women's health companies. As of today, no meaningful response has been received.

Platforms Won't Fix What They Won't Acknowledge

The open letter calls on social media platforms to update their moderation policies to reflect medical context and gender equity. It calls on policymakers to bring platforms to the table and ensure digital regulation addresses gender bias.

A new coalition, the Women's Health Visibility Alliance, has formed to sustain the pressure, including brands like Essity, Clue, Hertility, Daye, and Mooncup. These are hundreds of doctors, founders, and researchers, and the platforms have been ignoring them for years.

Unfortunately, open letters are often not enough to move platforms. Letters get filed, PR teams issue vague commitments about "reviewing policies," and the algorithm keeps doing what it does. What does move platforms is regulatory risk and advertiser pressure.

For all the good that it brings, social media and all the algorithms that come with it are also deeply flawed, so if our only idea for a solution is to ban teenagers from it, we would be better off getting rid of it altogether. Because until the moderation systems that suppress a menopause educator while leaving a harassment account intact are treated as the liability they are, we’re pretty much treating an open wound with a dirty band-aid, and that’s exactly as helpful as it sounds.