Published on May 19, 2026
Republicans in Washington often call the EU’s digital platform rules online censorship. For those working in adult industries, sex education and women’s health, the rules should be a tool to combat suppression of lawful speech online – but many say restrictions on their posts and accounts are only intensifying. Businesses, women’s health organizations, educators and […]
Republicans in Washington often call the EU’s digital platform rules online censorship. For those working in adult industries, sex education and women’s health, the rules should be a tool to combat suppression of lawful speech online – but many say restrictions on their posts and accounts are only intensifying.
Businesses, women’s health organizations, educators and activists in these sectors frequently see large platforms, especially Meta’s (META) Instagram, remove or hide posts and accounts dedicated to subjects such as cervical exams, sex toys and reproductive medicine. The take-downs can harm businesses engaged in legal activity, obscure valuable health information and push users into self-censoring with euphemisms.
Ana Ornelas, a sex educator and activist in Berlin, said Instagram deleted her personal account in late April. Her last post before the deletion was a video in which Ornelas was clothed and describing an event with sexual toys and kinks. Instagram told her the post contained “human exploitation.” She submitted an appeal to the platform and received a message saying Instagram would review her request and either restore her account or permanently disable it without an option for further appeal.
“It feels like it’s language designed to intimidate people that don’t know what [legal] tools are available,” she said.
Ornelas said she considered bringing the case to the Berlin media authority, one of the regulators that reviews such complaints. But her account was restored a few hours later, then disabled again. She received an email from Instagram informing her that her posts violated the platform’s policies. She submitted another appeal and her account was later restored.
Around 30-40% of Ornelas’ income comes directly or indirectly from Instagram, where she creates content and users contact her to give workshops or talks, she said.
The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) requires big platforms to clearly explain these decisions and make it easy for users to challenge them. The companies also have to provide easily accessible information referring to out-of-court dispute settlement bodies, which assess whether their content moderation decisions violated the law and should be overturned. But that appeals system can be difficult to navigate, platforms aren’t required to adhere to those decisions and many users whose posts or accounts were removed report difficulties reaching anyone at the platforms, let alone detailed explanations for the content removals.
Having legal recourse “is all well and good, but time-consuming and potentially expensive,” said Athena Lamnisos, chief executive of The Eve Appeal, a UK gynecological cancer charity that funds research and participates in advocacy efforts in the EU. Earlier this month, Instagram took down an educational post from the group showing an illustration of vulvar anatomy.
“You have to collect a body of evidence,” she said. “All of these things are very difficult for small organizations. It’s just not where our focus is. We want to get health information into the hands of the people who need it.”
While The Eve Appeal refuses to use euphemisms, Lamnisos fretted about groups that use code words to dodge content removals.
“People need to know their physical anatomy, and they need to use proper words,” said Lamnisos, who’s also on the board of CensHERship, a campaign that tracks and combats these kinds of content moderation decisions.
A Meta spokesperson said, “While we have rules on adult nudity and sexual activity, we do make allowances for content intended to raise awareness about sexual and reproductive health issues on our platforms.” The Capitol Forum provided Meta with a list of cases mentioned in this story, and the spokesperson said Meta is investigating them. “We do sometimes make mistakes,” they said, and Meta provides “tools that offer the opportunity to appeal if someone believes we got it wrong.”
Cheex, a feminist porn company based in Berlin, has battled with several platforms. Its Instagram account was disabled and restored several times in 2024, it lost access to TikTok and sued LinkedIn to gain access to its account after it was deleted, said Malia Siobhan Bauer, Cheex’s brand and communications manager. The company’s social media posts don’t contain nudity, she said.
A LinkedIn spokesperson pointed to the company’s policies on acceptable content, which includes a restriction on users sharing “material depicting nudity or sexual activity.” “We welcome broad conversations about the world of work so long as they’re kept professional,” the spokesperson said. TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Each time Cheex’s Instagram account was deleted, Bauer said employees had it restored only via personal contacts. In some cases, influencers who work with Cheex asked their managers to intervene or knew someone working at Meta who helped, she said.
In one case, Cheex’s account was disabled shortly after it posted a photo of oysters. Last year, Instagram told Cheex one of their stories didn’t comply with community guidelines on adult sexual services. The story mentioned a promotion for one week of free porn and didn’t show nudity or explicit images. Cheex’s Instagram engagement was lower for about two weeks after that, Bauer said.
For Lovehoney, an adult products company with offices in Berlin and the UK, one of the most frustrating aspects of Instagram’s removals of posts displaying their products – not to mention educational videos about cervical screenings and use of condoms – was seeing rival sex toy sellers’ arguably more explicit photos remain fully visible.
Meta has repeatedly suspended the company’s Instagram profiles, and last year, despite Lovehoney “adopting its most cautious and neutral content strategy to date,” the tech giant banned Lovehoney’s accounts, disabling its namesake Instagram page for nearly a month and a half, according to a November complaint from the sex toy retailer. Lovehoney lost about 24 million impressions while its accounts were disabled, said the complaint, which alleged Meta violated the DSA and other EU laws, and was sent to the commission and the Irish media regulator tasked with monitoring Meta’s DSA compliance.
“We struggled to challenge those decisions, and we were left in the dark with respect to the closure of our accounts or take-downs of specific content,” Matthias Korff, Lovehoney’s general counsel, said in an interview. The company has resorted to using codewords, restricting their ability to promote their products, Korff said.
The commission and the Irish Coimisiún na Meán didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Appeals Centre Europe, a prominent settlement body, received more than 500 social media disputes over removals of content for violating “adult nudity and sexual activity” policies in the year between April 2025 and March of this year, according to data shared with The Capitol Forum. That made it the policy with the highest number of valid disputes over removed content. Of the more than 200 decisions the Dublin-based dispute resolution organization made on these appeals, the group overturned the platform’s decision 48% of the time.
Meta’s community guidelines don’t allow nudity, sexual activity or images like sex toys in contact with specific body parts.
In around 2.8 million instances, Instagram removed content tagged as containing “nudity” and demoted the visibility of that content in around 1.1 million cases between July and December 2025, according to the platform’s most recent transparency data covering users in the EU. It terminated accounts in 3,306 cases where “nudity” was tagged. Instagram removed content tagged as “adult sexual material” in 628,889 instances and demoted 412,094 cases of such content during the same period. It terminated 90,414 accounts under that category.
There’s been an uptick in content and account deletion on various social media platforms in the last few weeks, said Martha Dimitratou, executive director of Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit organization that tracks censorship of reproductive health content. In April, the group documented more than 130 instances, including the deletion of accounts that provide information on abortion access.
“It’s affecting a lot of European organizations, despite the Digital Services Act,” she said.
The DSA as it’s written could protect people from censorship on social media, but most people don’t know the law exists and platforms don’t give users sufficient justifications when they take down accounts, Dimitratou said. Platforms should give European users more information and explain their rights to appeal content removal decisions under the DSA, she added. European regulators could do a better job of making the rules work. “If not the EU, I don’t know who will do it,” she said.
The commission has been investigating whether Meta is violating the DSA – including the effectiveness of its internal system for handling complaints about content moderation decisions – since April 2024. In October, the enforcer preliminarily found that Facebook’s and Instagram’s appeal systems don’t “appear to allow users to provide explanations or supporting evidence to substantiate their appeals.” A final decision could come with a fine of up to 6% of Meta’s global annual revenues.
Still, some worry the law is falling short.
“The DSA is a good starting point,” but too generic an instrument, said Valeria Leuti of Tech4Fem, an Italian network of women’s health-focused digital firms and investors. Clear guidance from regulators should define harmful content and ensure platforms don’t unjustly restrict sexual and reproductive health information online, she added.
Critics argue the DSA is censorship and pushes platforms to remove content. An EU commission official said the vast majority – 99.9% – of very large online platforms’ content moderation decisions from July-December 2025 were taken at platforms’ own initiative. The other 0.1% was made up of decisions platforms made after receiving notices from individuals and public authorities.
Among the measures Instagram reported taking against content it tagged as “nudity” in the second half of 2025, the platform said that in around 4 million instances, it took those steps at its own initiative, meaning without receiving an order to do so from an EU country’s authorities, according to the platform’s transparency report.
“We cannot give the power to Meta [to decide] what’s right and what’s wrong” regarding online content, Leuti said, especially when it’s about women’s health.
