As
abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social-media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication — and online platforms like Google and Facebook are helping.
This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will
stand trial in Nebraska after being accused of performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Prosecutors said Burgess helped her daughter find and take pills that would induce an abortion. The teenage Burgess also faces charges of illegally disposing of the fetus' remains.
TechCrunch reported that internal chat logs were provided to law-enforcement officers by the social-media company, which indicated the pair had discussed their plan to find the medication through the app.
Meta said in a
statement regarding the Nebraska incident that it responded to "valid legal warrants from local law enforcement" prior to the
Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned nationwide abortion rights and allowed for bans in some states.
And though the warrants Meta responded to in this case "did not mention abortion" — since law enforcement had requested the chat logs while investigating the teen's disposal of the remains, which incidentally revealed the discussion of abortion pills — the subsequent charges reveal how data released by social-media companies can be used to prosecute people for abortion, even when they are being investigated for other reasons.
Pharmacies sharing data
An investigation by
ProPublica found online pharmacies that sell abortion medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol are sharing sensitive data, including users' web addresses, relative location, and search data, with Google and other third-party sites — which allows the data to be recoverable through law-enforcement requests.
ProPublica found similar web trackers that capture user data on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that offer abortion pills by mail, including Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy, and Online Abortion Pill Rx.
None of the pharmacies immediately responded to Insider's requests for comment.
Representatives for the FBI told Insider they were "unable to accommodate" Insider's detailed request for information about the criteria required for officers to issue a request for a civilian's social media or internet history, what information is generally turned over to them in the pursuit of such information, and what channels officers used to make those requests.
Representatives for Google and the Los Angeles and New York police departments, two of the largest police forces in the country, did not respond to Insider's requests for comment.
"We comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so," a spokesperson for Meta told Insider. "In addition, we assess whether a request is consistent with internationally recognized standards on human rights, including due process, privacy, free expression and the rule of law. When we do comply, we only produce information that is narrowly tailored to that request. If we determine that a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back and will fight in court, if necessary. We do not provide governments with 'back doors' to people's information."
According to internal
statistics provided by Meta, the company complies with government requests for user data more than 70% of the time and receives more than 400,000 requests a year.
