Ronja Holopainen didn’t mean to fall down the rabbit hole. But, like so many things online, it just happened. One day last spring, the 21-year-old medical student was scrolling through Instagram when she stumbled into the strange world of period misinformation.

Her journey started simply enough. Searching Instagram using the hashtags “period” and “menstruation,” she quickly came across a deluge of posts promoting unsubstantiated ideas, such as girls being able to regulate or predict periods based on their astrological signs. Visiting the accounts responsible for them appeared to populate her feed with even more falsehoods. 

“When you get to one page, you start scrolling to the next and the next, and end up somewhere on the deep web,” she said.

The volume of distortions and inaccuracies shook Holopainen. So, she decided to meet them head-on. She was well-positioned to do so. For the past seven years, she has campaigned with the global girls’ rights organization Plan International. Bringing her experience of medicine and advocacy together, she set up an Instagram page — theperiodmove — to help girls climb out of the morass of pseudoscience that many of them have unwittingly stumbled into.