It happened again last week. Lisa Lundy logged into her company’s Instagram account only to be greeted with yet another rejection. This one was an advertisement about breast cancer awareness, featuring a close-up of a woman's bare decolletage with the caption: “90% of breast cancer diagnoses are not hereditary.” 

Lundy thought the ad could educate social media users about the risk factors for breast cancer, but it never saw the light of day. Instead, Instagram rejected it for violating its policies on nudity and sexual activity.

For more than a year, Lundy’s company, Complex Creatures, has struggled to find a home for its content on Instagram. The platform has rejected scores of the company’s advertisements and posts since its account went live in June 2022. Lundy co-founded Complex Creatures with her sister, a breast cancer survivor, to raise awareness about the disease and provide health and wellness products for women undergoing breast cancer treatment. But the content rejections came rolling in as soon as she started posting. It didn’t take long for Lundy to realize that Meta, owner of Instagram, was nixing her content because of its subject matter: the breast. 

“How do you desexualize the breast?” she asked. “It’s so much of what we’re trying to do.” But platforms like Instagram, Lundy said, “don’t want to let us.” In a call over Zoom, she shared some screenshots of her company’s censored content. One was a post about how massages can improve breast health, featuring a photo of a woman’s hands fully covering her breasts. “But they’re allowed to do this,” she sighed, pulling up an advertisement from a men’s health brand for an erectile dysfunction treatment containing an image of a hand clutching an eggplant with the caption: “Get hard.” The censorship, she added, “is an ongoing challenge. We’re talking about breast cancer and breast health.” Access to the right information about the disease and its risk factors, she explained, can be a matter of “life and death.”