Facebook and Instagram rejected an ad promoting the awareness of HIV prevention medication PrEP last week for being “political,” VICE reports.
Apicha Community Health Center — a New York primary care center that serves LGBTQ+ people, Asian and Pacific Islanders, and individuals living with and affected by HIV/AIDS — attempted to run a targeted ad campaign about PrEP on its Instagram account. A a pop-up message indicated they were denied the ability to run the campaign because the center “hadn’t been authorized to run ads about social issues, elections or politics.”
“They said the copy was the problem but were unable to tell us what part of the copy was too political,” said Phillip Miner, Apicha’s Director of Grants and Communications told VICE. “It’s incredibly frustrating to encounter these sort of road blocks.” Representatives for Facebook and Instagram did not immediately return them.’s requests for comment.
The campaign, which is viewable on Apicha CHC’s Instagram account, features artwork and interviews by “queer API NYC-based artists who created artwork that reflects their relationship with PrEP, stigma, and representation.” One of the posts that spotlights an illustration by Marcos Chin features a caption that reads: “What I remember is being raised in a way where if we didn’t talk about something, then it didn’t exist. And so I wonder if taking this pill challenges that way of thinking & uproots or subverts that denial.”
According to VICE, Apicha CHC wanted to run the ad campaign to specifically target API men who have sex with men and hopefully decrease the number of new HIV/AIDS cases within the demographic. The annual number of new cases among all New Yorkers has dropped by almost 31 percent since 2012, the year that FDA approved Truvada for use of PrEP. However, API New Yorkers have seen relatively the same amount of new diagnosed cases in the same time frame in comparison to their Black, white, and Latinx counterparts, whose number of cases have dropped. The Instagram ad campaign would have been funded by the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute, as part of the Institute’s PrEP Aware initiative.
Facebook told British news site PinkNews that the ad had been denied because the members of Apicha CHC needed to be verified in order to run “political” campaigns. “We’ve had a policy for some time that requires US advertisers running ads about social issues, elections or politics to complete an ad authorisation process before they can run ads targeted to people in the US,” a spokesperson told PinkNews. “We have this policy to ensure that we prevent foreign interference in elections and provide more information about who is behind ads on Facebook. Apicha had not completed the authorisation process, which meant some of their ads were rejected.”
