Social media posts educating public about illicit drugs being removed by Meta, Australian health experts say

Public health workers are warning lives could be at risk due to social media sites automatically censoring educational posts about illicit drugs circulating in the community.

The Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League (AIVL) said social media companies had taken down a string of “critical alerts”, preventing them from reaching the people who needed to see them.

Organisations including Pill Testing Australia, CanTEST, and New Zealand-based company KnowYourStuffNZ have had posts removed and accounts suspended. 

In some cases, AIVL said entire pages and personal accounts had been permanently deleted.

AIVL said Meta’s automated content moderation systems were flagging the alerts on Facebook and Instagram as promoting drug use.

“If those messages are blocked, people don’t know the service exists, and they lose the chance to make safer decisions.”

‘Time for them to grow up’

David Caldicott, the clinical lead at CanTEST and Pill Testing Australia who is also an emergency doctor, said posts were sometimes being “withheld, altered, or censored because they contain information about drugs”.

“This is health information, but unfortunately, the transition from a human-mediated system to an AI-mediated system means that it just gets pinged and pulled,” Dr Caldicott said.

With Meta an American-owned company, Dr Caldicott said he believed the problem was also that the United States had a different approach to education around drug use.

Organisations such as CanTEST aim to not only warn drug users about dangerous drugs that could cause serious illness or death, but also to come to their service and have their drugs tested before using them.

The goal is to educate, rather than punish, drug users and prevent drug-related deaths.

While AI had increased the problem, Dr Caldicott said it had been an obstacle from the start.

“What has happened really is that we have advanced in how we deal medically with drugs-related problems and social media,” he said. 

“Social media clearly has the technical capacity to keep up, but the moral oversight has not kept up.

He described the actions of social media companies as “unacceptable”, especially when coupled with the fact that younger people typically got their news and information from social media rather than legacy media.

“We’re providing health-related information to a group of young people who obviously require it, and people without any health qualifications are interfering with that message,” Dr Caldicott said. 

“If people can’t get the information about dangerous drugs available on the market, they might consume those drugs uninformed, as they were prior to our introduction of pill testing.

Calls for e-Safety Commissioner to intervene 

Dr Caldicott is calling on social media companies to make a commitment to “engage with healthcare providers and allow proper information to be distributed in a timely fashion”.

The organisations affected are also calling on the e-Safety Commissioner to intervene and “compel” Meta to “restore all accounts and content of member organisations that have been removed or suspended on the basis of drug-related community standards violations”.

In the meantime, Pill Testing Australia has developed an app called Night Coach, which doesn’t rely on social media to spread awareness and information.

Stephanie Stephens from Directions Health Services, which runs CanTEST, said they were continuing to look for ways to resolve the social media issues.

“We attempt to repost, reinstate things, we use other platforms like our website, but … the reach of social media in particular is so helpful, so we’ll be exploring avenues to have it better resolved.”

Ms Stephens said tens of thousands of people followed CanTEST on social media.

She said that in December, a post about a potentially lethal opioid was taken down just before Split Milk festival was held in Canberra.

She urged people looking for alerts and information to go to the CanTEST website.

In a statement an eSafety spokesperson said as the independent regulator for online safety in Australia, eSafety’s role was “to implement and enforce the Online Safety Act”.

“This includes obligations under the Online Safety Codes and Standards which require service providers to take certain steps to reduce the risk of unlawful and highly harmful material on their services,” the spokesperson said.

“They do not require services to remove lawful material such as public health information relating to drugs. The removal of material of this nature is a matter for the services involved and should be raised directly with those services.

“eSafety encourages organisations to take a multi-channel approach when sharing important public health information. Social media platforms set and enforce their own terms of service, which means lawful content may still be subject to moderation or removal.

“Relying on a range of communication channels can help ensure critical information remains accessible to the communities who need it.”

In response to questions from the ABC, Meta declined to comment.