The founder of a pregnancy-pillow company has told the BBC that Instagram removed her adverts and that Meta, the platform's owner, told her on a call that the problem was the word "pregnancy". Irene Breen, founder and chief executive of BellaMoon, said it took 10 months of conversations with the company before the restrictions were lifted.
Meta declined to comment on her case. It told the BBC that businesses can run adverts promoting wellness, sexual health and reproductive products and services, but that restrictions exist to avoid users across countries and cultures having a negative experience.
The report, published on Friday, lands seven months after the Commons Women and Equalities Committee said "shadow banning" of women's health content was "unacceptable" and called the assurances it received from the Women's Health Minister "inadequate". The Government's reply in May pointed to the Online Safety Act 2023 and said the largest platforms "cannot arbitrarily remove content".
Ms Breen said she received a notification in January 2025 that Instagram was removing adverts for her pillows. "We had to scrub the word from our entire website… from the product name," she told the BBC. "We had to remove all our URLs which had pregnancy in them and rename them all." She said the business suffered a significant financial hit, including more than £100,000 of ineffective advertising spend, according to The Independent.
A post on her LinkedIn profile quotes what she presents as a message from Meta: "Remove the word pregnancy from your website. We're blocking your site, restricting your ad account, and turning off your data access." That text is Ms Breen's own rendering of the message, and Meta has neither confirmed nor denied it.
The Independent reported the same case last November, publishing a BellaMoon screenshot in which Meta had drawn a line through the word "pregnancy". That report said Meta had reclassified the company's flagship pillow as a medical device after introducing new health advertising categories. Meta has not confirmed either explanation, and the claim that the single word triggered the action rests on Ms Breen's account.
The BBC piece widens the complaint to charities and other companies. Athena Lamnisos, chief executive of the gynaecological cancer charity Eve Appeal, said hashtags on the charity's posts had been suppressed. "One of the hashtags, unbelievably, was #vaginalcancer," she said. She described a labelled anatomical diagram about vulval cancer being pulled and then reappearing behind a sensitivity filter.
Deirdre O'Neill, co-founder of the fertility testing company Hertility, said a post featuring a woman talking about endometriosis was flagged and classified as "social issues, elections or politics". Advertising on TikTok had become "like an obstacle course", she added. TikTok told the BBC it is transparent about content that cannot be promoted on its For You feed and lets creators appeal.
The campaign group CensHERship, which co-published a report with the investment portfolio The Case For Her last month, says 96% of 187 respondents in more than 20 countries reported censorship or suppression of women's health content in the previous 12 months, against 95% a year earlier. The respondents answered an open call for evidence about censorship, so the figures describe those who came forward rather than the sector as a whole. The group also reports that 65% of respondents now self-censor, up from 53%, a rise it attributes to people who joined the survey after its first report.
Clio Wood, the group's co-founder, told the BBC that platform policies "tend to be incredibly broad, whereby more often than not, nudity is conflated with sexual activity". She said: "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."
The select committee's report on the menstrual health of girls and young women, published on 4 March, said: "The Government must hold social media platforms to account for inappropriate censorship of important women's health content. "Shadow banning" is unacceptable and must cease. Social media companies must recognise the significant role they play in girls' and women's access to important health-related content."
The committee said Baroness Merron, the Women's Health Minister, had given an "unconvincing" reply when asked what her department was doing, referring MPs to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Online Safety Act. It added that it did not share the Government's confidence that the Act's transparency provisions would solve the problem, and that Ofcom "is unlikely to be able to monitor compliance until at least 2028".
The Government's response, published by the Department of Health and Social Care on 26 May, said: "The Online Safety Act 2023 does not prevent adults or children from accessing legal content about women's health." It said the largest services must be clear what content is acceptable for adult users and must enforce their rules consistently.
Sarah Owen, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said in a statement that day: "The Government should take the problem of 'shadow banning' more seriously."
In March 2025 six femtech companies, co-ordinated by CensHERship and The Case For Her, filed complaints against the platforms with the European Commission under the Digital Services Act. No outcome of those complaints has been announced.
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