Facebook Users Notice Drug-Related Terms Like ‘Acid’ Missing from Search Results

Facebook users are noticing something unusual when they look for certain terms on the social media platform. As of the time of this article’s publication, many terms related to illegal drugs and some prescription drugs were yielding zero results in platform searches.

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Groups That Use Terms Like ‘Acid’ in Their Name Aren’t Showing Up in Facebook Searches

Searches for a wide variety of terms, from directly related to drugs to indirectly, were yielding empty search results as of Friday evening, September 13.

After seeing posts about the issue in a few Facebook groups, Heavy tested this on both a desktop browser and a Facebook mobile app. Both devices yielded zero results for searches like “cannabis,” “marijuana,” and certain prescriptions like “fentanyl” and “oxycodone.”

More distantly related terms like “acid” yielded zero results too.

Even “acid watcher” (which is the first part of a book titled “The Acid Watcher Diet,”) yielded zero results. But searches that used “acidwatcher” together as one word did show results.

However, other terms like “Tylenol” and “ibuprofen” were not banned and yielded a wide range of search results.

One private acid reflux Facebook group, in a post that is not available publicly, noted that they had to change their name and remove “acid” from the title — leaving only “reflux” — in order to still appear in search results.

Numerous people commented that when they searched for terms like “acid” or even “acid reflux,” they got warning messages such as: “Are you sure you want to continue? The term you searched for is sometimes associated with the sale of drugs.”

On X (formerly known as Twitter), some users have been posting about the warnings since early September. A number of people were getting the warning from searches that weren’t related to drugs at all.

One person hit the warning when searching for Hillsdale College online courses.

Another person posted on X that they got the same warning searching for Hillsdale.

Another person got a warning that read “Are you sure you want to continue?” when they searched for “advisory neighborhood commission” on Facebook.

Heavy has reached out to Facebook for a comment about the search results.

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Facebook Has Been Recently Questioned About Illegal Drug Ads on Its Site

In the last month, Meta has been questioned by members of Congress about illegal drug ads on its Facebook platform, the New York Post reported.

Nineteen legislators sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter with concerns about illegal drug ads on both Facebook and Instagram that linked to third-party platforms selling illegal drugs and prescriptions, according to the New York Post.

The New York Post reported that the letter read, in part: “At a hearing before the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary in January 2024, you personally apologized to the parents of children who have died following their exposure to exploitation, harassment, and drugs online… Despite this and your company’s own Community Standards, Meta approved ads throughout 2024 that displayed obvious drug sales…”

Meta said in a statement that its systems rejected “hundreds of thousands of ads for violating our drug policies,” The New York Post shared.

CNBC reported that Meta Vice President of Global Legal Strategy, Rachel Lieber, sent a letter to lawmakers that said, in part, that Meta was “committed to playing an important role in the solution” to a problem that was “bigger than any single platform.”

On September 12, Rep. Tim Walberg said that Meta’s response was not sufficient, CNBC reported. In a statement, Walberg said: “Meta’s response not only ignores most of the questions posed in our letter, but also refuses to acknowledge that these illicit drug ads were approved and monetized by Meta and allowed to run on their platforms…”

 

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