Jackie Rotman, founder and CEO of the Center for Intimacy Justice joins Cheddar News to talk about why Facebook is banning ads by companies targeting women's sexual health but not ads catered to men. 

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Report: Facebook Rejected Ads Focused on Women’s Sexual Health

and everyone in between meals and chatter news. A new report from the center for intimacy Justice found that facebook rejected ads from 60 different companies focused on women's sexual health facebook sighted policies regarding adult products and services. And about half of those companies also had their accounts suspended at some point joining us Now to discuss this report is Jackie Rotman founder and Ceo over at the center for intimacy Justice. Welcome to the show Jackie. What an investigation you guys undertook here. So what type of companies are being rejected by facebook here? Yeah, thank you so much for having me. The company's stand, menopause, pelvic pain, menstrual health, fertility, postpartum care. It was a wide array of women's health companies. 59 of the 60 were founded by women and one was founded by a non binary person. And already, since we released this a week ago, we've heard from dozens more companies around the world saying that this has happened to them as well. Okay. And so what is facebook's policy on all of this? Why are they sort of flagging? What seems to be completely benign information here? Facebook's policy is called their adult products and services policy where they're flagging these companies under it. And what facebook says is they don't exactly define what they mean by adult products, but they do list examples of products such as lubrication to allow to support and relieve vaginal dryness. Those ads, they explicitly say in their policies are allowed, but their algorithms and processes aren't matching that. So women are telling us that if they say the word vagina in an ad or vaginal dryness, it's automatically flagged. And that means that customers get an ad for a lotion instead of vaginal lotion and don't know what it's for and can't get help. Facebook also says in their policy that any adds to do with pleasure for anyone are not allowed. But in practice there allowing ads for erectile dysfunction. Companies with slogans like get hard or get your money back and they're not allowing ads for a wide array of health companies for people who aren't cis gender. Men essentially saying that the pleasure of men and their health is privileged and how these policies are enforced while so many other groups are excluded, including from basic health. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Because that's what's sort of the most outrageous part out of all of this is this is not being equally distributed across both genders here. Why are we sort of seeing sort of a different sort of case study when it comes to men and women here? You know, a lot of this has to do with money and power and investing in 2017 to erectile dysfunction companies were started to provide, you know, erectile dysfunction drugs directly to your door. And since their inception erectile dysfunction drugs have been allowed. It's enabled these two companies and others to grow to evaluations today of $5 billion $1 billion dollars while in those same five years, an entire generation of entrepreneurs addressing sexual health for women and people of diverse genders have been blocked from that same economic opportunity. But this isn't only an issue of economics and business and financial equality for women and people of diverse genders. It's also an issue that affects our most intimate lives when we have ads that are allowed for half the population that's sending a message, a message in our society that they matter and their intimate lives matter while at the same time, you know, a recent study showed that half of women are tolerating physically painful sex and intimacy because they believe that that's normal. And these ads that could be telling them you deserve better. You deserve happiness in your intimate lives are being censored and excluded and silenced and that affects us in our daily lives. Yeah. And we were just showing our viewers some of the ads that were flagged by facebook that you guys had had flagged as well. Uh and and and we know how many companies, especially small businesses rely on facebook and sort of its reach to get to new customers and to drive revenue is the fact that this stuff is getting flagged by facebook. Is this impacting a lot of these companies bottom line, are they seeing revenue declines because of this? Absolute. So many businesses have told us this is the greatest issue holding back not just their businesses, but many would say this is one of the biggest stifling factors for the women's health industry at large, there is no replacement for Facebook advertising. It makes up 80% of social media advertising. It's highly targeted. It's much more affordable than alternatives by facebook blocking this. They are affecting not just these businesses trajectories, but what types of technologies get funded that effect and support our lives and our health in terms of investment and affect an entire uh segment. Um, and that has implications for health as well as our culture and technology. Jackie. Are these companies pushing back on this? Have they heard anything from facebook regarding this is facebook willing to sort of, I don't know, evolve this sort of archaic policy here. What has sort of been the pushback or sort of the reaction to this? Yeah, this, this report was released a week ago. We're really, we want to directly engage with facebook. Our goal is to have a seat at the table for stakeholders who are directly impacted and we're eager to engage and to help them fix this. Them to provide more data. We have extensive data for years, entrepreneurs investors and others in this category have talked with facebook and dozens in multiple different facebook categories. And I shared this research with facebook last april but was told that my power point got lost. So it's time for facebook to take this more seriously. We now know this isn't just one or two or three companies, this is an entire category and they need to address this. But so far a lot of the companies that have brought this up, despite having financial and moral interest in getting this policy change have been ignored. And it's time for that to change. Absolutely, wow. What a story here, Jackie Robinson, founder and Ceo at the Center for intimacy, Justice. Such a pleasure to have you here. And you can read the full report by visiting intimacy Justice dot org for more.