Strategies for Combatting Abortion Disinformation in the Post-Roe Era

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In the days and weeks leading up to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, disinformation about abortion surged online. Many of the false claims, part of a decades-in-the-making coordinated campaign waged by anti-choice groups to restrict access to abortion, infiltrated the final Supreme Court majority opinion. As people wade through the complex web of compounding and conflicting legal repercussions across the country, anti-choice actors continue to cloud our information sources with more disinformation. Lessons from decades of abortion disinformation can help communicators and advocates anticipate and prepare to combat what will come next.

According to several reports, disinformation about abortion more than doubled on Facebook and Twitter in the week following the early May leak of the SCOTUS draft opinion. And in the hours immediately following the final ruling in June, anti-choice groups began spending thousands of dollars on Facebook ads intended to misinform audiences about the safety of abortion, an especially insidious tactic during the immediate aftermath as states scrambled to understand the legal ramifications in their jurisdictions. Abortion is now banned outright in nine states, and more than half the country is poised to ban or heavily restrict access to the procedure based on trigger laws that can take effect following SCOTUS’ decision. As people who can become pregnant navigate a complex legal minefield to understand what this decision means for their own well-being, anti-choice groups are obscuring access to accurate information about the types of reproductive health care options available. The people who will be hurt most are those who already face barriers accessing abortion care: Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, those working to make ends meet, those in the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, people with disabilities, and those living in rural communities. This is, of course, the exact aim of most disinformation campaigns: to keep marginalized people in the margins.

While disinformation and framing are just two among the many tools anti-choice advocates have used in their fight to limit essential abortion access, they are the vantage point from which I have watched this fight unfold over the last decade. I began my career combatting disinformation at Media Matters for America, where I monitored countless hours of news media to track and combat conservative disinformation. I’ve had a front-row seat to watching harmful frames and narratives make their way from fringe actors, to mainstream news outlets, to the highest court in the land.

Infiltrating the Supreme Court

Many long-debunked false claims and harmful frames made their way into Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s June 24, 2022, majority opinion. For example, Alito referred to intentionally stigmatizing language like “abortion on demand,” which furthers the false and harmful frame that people who access abortion care “make capricious, immoral decisions to terminate their pregnancies,” and do so in an easily accessible abortion free-for-all manner. This frame could not be further from reality. Even before the fall of Roe v. Wade triggered outright bans in many states, abortion care was already increasingly difficult to access.

Alito also cited a previous ruling by a lower court that concluded dilation and evacuation procedures are a “barbaric practice, dangerous for the maternal patient and demeaning to the medical profession,” carrying water for the false frame that abortion procedures are not safe, and suggesting that restricting access is an attempt to protect the safety of pregnant people. In reality, dilation and evacuation is widely recognized by medical experts to be among the safest abortion procedures and is also often used in the case of miscarriage. And numerous studies have repeatedly found that abortion procedures in the United States are incredibly safe and present minimal complications.

Preventing Amplification

As the dust begins to settle on our new post-Roe reality, anti-choice activists’ disinformation campaigns will proliferate. This moment is pivotal: We must prevent amplification of disinformation that would seek to cloud people’s access to the information they need about the abortion options they have available to them. As communicators and advocates, we have a critical role to play. By anticipating the disinformation that’s to come and preparing our partners with strategic tools to analyze and determine whether and how to respond, we can prevent amplification and spread of harmful disinformation.

Here’s what we can do:

Avoid debunking one-for-one. Resist the urge to immediately debunk or interact with false content. Anti-abortion actors waging disinformation campaigns want you to correct their false information. Engaging with their content, even to debunk or correct it, raises the content in algorithms and inadvertently contributes to its spread and amplification.

To avoid playing into the manipulation tactics of digital martyrs, ask yourself a few questions before reacting directly to false content: Am I giving air to dangerous content? Will the content in question directly impact or make its way to my priority audience or is it likely to stay in a small echo chamber? If the disinformation is limited to one channel or platform and is not yet spreading to your audiences, it is best to avoid engaging with it. Continue to monitor for spread and report the content to the platform.

Hold social platforms accountable for accuracy. While Big Tech companies and social media platforms have been the subject of calls to better mitigate disinformation on their platforms, simply removing disinformation content in a piecemeal manner is not enough. The bigger problem is their business model. Social media’s algorithms are designed to optimize for engagement, regardless of the content. Their profits depend on generating new and increasingly engaged users. Under this model, salacious, emotional, or outright shocking content is king. And while many platforms have policies against publishing misinformation in ads, we must hold them accountable for enforcing those policies. When an anti-abortion group began buying ads on Facebook misinforming about the safety of medication abortions immediately following the leak of the SCOTUS decision, Facebook neglected to respond to requests about whether the content violated its policies. The ad stayed up for six weeks. You can use this guide to report content with false or misleading information to the platform on which it appears.

Use messaging strategies to combat disinformation. If the content begins to make its way to your audiences but is not doing so widely or rapidly, you have a choice between balancing messaging and inoculation messaging.

Balancing messaging works to stop the spread of disinformation by poking a hole in the echo chamber and introducing skepticism around the falsehood. Use this strategy sparingly as any form of engaging with harmful content will amplify it. If you do use this messaging strategy, your response should provide facts in a non-confrontational and apolitical format, and should come from as neutral a messenger as possible. Remember, your goal in balancing messaging is to stop the fire, not fuel it.

Inoculation messaging primes your audiences to recognize disinformation before they encounter it, by delivering factual information while simultaneously discrediting the disinformation by exposing its motives or techniques. The key difference is your audience and messenger: Balancing messaging should feel neutral, while inoculation messaging will invariably have a motive associated with it.

And finally, if the disinformation is scaling rapidly among your priority audiences, inoculation and balancing messaging will likely not be enough. You’ll need to begin actively debunking it. Debunking messaging uses a “truth sandwich” strategy, wherein you state the fact concisely, warn audiences about the myth, discredit the disinformation, and reiterate the truth. This works because audiences tend to remember the first and last things they hear in a message.

Fill content voids by sharing accurate information that is easily accessible to all audiences. During this highly charged and confusing time, as anti-abortion activists are purposefully obscuring information about how to access abortion care, easily accessible content is instrumental to help people cut through disinformation to get the abortion care they need now. The objective of anti-abortion activists is to confuse people, so we must focus on creating content that gets people to the truth as quickly as possible. Content should provide clear-cut information that helps people take action: Clearly explain the abortion laws in your state and the abortion options your audiences have available to them. Share reliable resources so audiences know where to go for information they can trust. When creating content, follow best accessibility practices to ensure your content is accessible for all, including using image descriptions, high-contrast colors, and reviewed captions for videos.

SHERo (Sisters Helping Every woman Rise and Organize), an organization dedicated to building and promoting leadership among Black women, girls, and femmes in Mississippi, provides a strong example: Their website prominently displays current facts about abortion access in Mississippi, has prominent links to allow viewers outside of Mississippi to understand the abortion laws in their respective states, and provides resources for people to learn where and how to access abortion. Similarly, Physicians for Reproductive Health has used their social media platform to provide concise explainers for audiences on a variety of topics, such as avoiding stigmatizing language, the historical context of certain frames about abortion, and medical facts to correct inaccurate tropes about abortion.

Avoid stigmatizing language. Stigmatizing abortion has been a long-standing strategy anti-choice activists use to frame abortion as a moral issue, rather than a health care issue. Stigmatizing language poses a particularly sinewy threat: Well-intentioned people and anti-abortion activists alike are equally vulnerable to reinforcing it. Stigmatizing language reinforces harmful frames that become anchors or mental shortcuts for how audiences understand an issue. Disinformation is rarely just about a single piece of content or even a single coordinated campaign. Rather, disinformation and harmful frames have immense staying power because they tap into audiences’ worldviews and ideologies. Using language like “abortion on demand,” as Alito did, not only paints a misleading picture about the restrictive laws and regulations that people must navigate to access abortion; it also suggests that the problem is capricious decision-making, and therefore the solution lies in making abortion care less accessible.

Abortion stigma often appears in incredibly obvious ways, like referring to abortion as “barbaric,” as Alito did. But stigmatizing frames are also perpetuated inadvertently: When mainstream news outlets use images or footage of people who are far along in pregnancy to accompany stories on abortion, they falsely imply that the majority of people who access abortion are 40 weeks pregnant. In reality, the vast majority—93 percent—of abortions occur at or before 13 weeks of pregnancy, when it is typically not outwardly visible.

In your own messaging, familiarize yourself with common stigmatizing phrases and language and avoid using them. This includes language that is gender exclusionary, reinforces stereotypes about who gets abortions and why, and imagery that does not accurately reflect the range of safe abortion care available. Never engage with anti-abortion activists in their own language; repetition, even if in an attempt to counter to debunk it, simply reinforces the harmful frame.

A Long Game

Many organizations led by Black and Brown people who have been leading the fight and working tirelessly to protect abortion access for years have modeled collectivism, community care, and mutual aid, which we must all replicate to continue paving the way for the future of this movement. In that spirit, my colleagues at Spitfire Strategies have created a free guide for communicators and advocates who want to develop strategies for monitoring, analyzing, and combatting disinformation, as well as messaging guidance for how to talk about abortion in a comprehensive, equitable, and inclusive way.

Disinformation is a long game, and it proliferates as one of the biggest threats to justice and equity across a wide range of intersecting issues: from abortion and reproductive health care to racial justice, environmental justice and climate change, voting and civic participation, immigration, and more. The good news is that we have many of the tools we need to outsmart bad actors.

Read more stories by Liv Kittel.