"Facebook fails to stop Spanish language anti-abortion disinformation, study says", 18 May 2022

Anti-abortion Facebook pages with millions of followers are spreading disinformation about abortion to Spanish speakers with little to no intervention from the social media platform, according to a new report from Naral Pro-Choice America.

The abortion rights group examined nine Facebook pages that reach more than 2.79 million people..., part of its efforts to show how disinformation is disseminated by opponents of abortion. Researchers found that several of the pages “repeatedly spread medically inaccurate information about abortion without any action from Facebook”, highlighting what experts have described as a crisis of Spanish-language misinformation...

“What’s clear here is that anti-choice extremists are capitalizing on social media companies’ failure to moderate Spanish-language disinformation,” Mini Timmaraju, the Naral Pro-Choice America president, said...

Many of the Spanish-language Facebook pages examined by Naral researchers spread disinformation about the safety of abortion, claiming that it leads to increased risk of breast cancer, anxiety, infertility, depression and suicide. Some posts have been viewed thousands of times without intervention from Facebook.

The content spreads the same disinformation about abortion as English-language anti-abortion groups, which also push medically inaccurate information about abortion and demonizes abortion providers, the report says.

Catholicism plays a key role in much of the Spanish-language content, which suggests that support for abortion care conflicts with religious identity.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Naral’s findings.

The failure to remove abortion disinformation has “direct implications for the 72% of Latinx people in the United States who use its platform”, the report states.