Women’s Health and Wellbeing: Online Censorship

Emily Darlington Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Westminster Hall

[Emily Darlington (Milton Keynes Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of the censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I want to flag at the beginning of this debate that I will be using a selection of words that big tech deems too sexual for its platforms. I hope everyone in this room can hold their composure and not get too flustered when I mention “sexual” terms such as vaginal atrophy and pelvic prolapse. To reassure the Chair, the precedent has already been set in the House for most of these terms. “Vagina” was first used in the House in 1961; “labia minora” in 1983; “orgasm” in 1974; “clitoris” in 1971; and “vulva” goes all the way back to the 1880s.

I must make a point about the historical use of the word “orgasm”. My team had a really interesting time searching Hansard for this debate. As they trawled through it, they found really interesting examples of “orgasm” being used, which I find quite entertaining. In 1978 the former Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch spoke passionately in favour of the creation of the Defence Select Committee, saying:

“I am firmly convinced that to discuss defence in the House in the traditional way is merely to give everyone the chance of an emotional orgasm.”—[Official Report, 3 April 1978; Vol. 947, c. 144.]

In 1982 the former Member for Grimsby spoke against the horrors of what would happen if cable television became the norm, warning that

“We shall finish up with wall-to-wall orgasm”

and

“constant pornography”.—[Official Report, 2 December 1982; Vol. 33, c. 471.]

With the country totally fed up with politics, I find it refreshing to remember that we in this House have the ability to discuss with passion what most of the country would find very dull. For millions of women and girls today, social media is where they learn about things like menopause, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, fibroids, vaginismus, dysmenorrhoea, bacterial vaginosis—are we all managing to control ourselves hearing these terms?—and countless other aspects of women’s health. If social media had been prevalent when I was desperately trying to figure out why my periods hurt more than giving birth, I am sure I would have been able to advocate for myself with my GP and receive my adenomyosis diagnosis far earlier than I did.

[Gordon McKee (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech on an important topic. She is very kind to give way. Does she agree with me that social media and the internet are great tools for people who suffer from unusual conditions or are a part of small communities? It is important that tech platforms do not penalise those communities by letting their algorithms stop those topics being discussed.

[Emily Darlington]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. He makes a really important point. It is so ingrained in us to go first to the internet to search for information. We have agreed ways to make sure health information is proper health information and that we are not getting bad science, but even when using the ticks that are supplied by various platforms, advice is still being shadow-banned. The online world is where women ask questions when they are often too embarrassed to ask elsewhere about period pain, discharge, lactation, or how to use a tampon safely.

[Dr Zubir Ahmed (Glasgow South West) (Lab)]

I speak as a recently departed member of the ministerial team that delivered the women’s health strategy and a former Minister responsible for digital health. Of course we must protect people from harmful content, but does my hon. Friend agree with me that at a time when medical misogyny is alive and thriving and women’s health outcomes are worse than men’s, we should think about how we can more responsibly leverage the algorithms to generate discussion, not silence it, about reproductive rights, cancer awareness, menstruation, menopause and everything else that she has mentioned?

[Emily Darlington]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I met some survivors of vulval cancer this morning. Even though they included a former midwife, a health advocate and other people who were well-informed, they told me about their struggle they experienced when advocating for themselves and to be taken seriously by their GP. They knew something was wrong with their vulvas, but they could not get through to their GP. Luckily, they all did; they are all doing well and have responded to their cancer treatment, but they might have been able to advocate effectively sooner had they been able to access more information than they found online. There are more women out there in exactly the same situation.

Words such as “tampon” are being suppressed by big tech platforms. “Shadow-banning” is the term for when users can still technically post but their visibility is secretly throttled. Their posts stop appearing in feeds, their reach collapses, their engagement disappears and their followers cannot find them. In the examples I have seen, the user is never clearly informed about it. That is censorship without accountability, which is harming education, charities and businesses, reinforcing stigma and, in some cases, putting women’s lives at risk. We need to call that what it is: algorithmic sexism.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion providers, women’s health campaigners and reproductive health organisations across the world. These takedowns began last October and have affected more than 50 organisations globally, some of which support tens of thousands of women. Repro Uncensored, a non-governmental organisation that tracks digital censorship focused on gender, health and justice, documented 210 instances of account removal and severe restriction this year, compared with 81 last year. That is not random moderation, it is escalation.

The Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based Arabic-language sexual health platform, says it receives warnings from Meta almost weekly. The organisation’s former director, Fatma Ibrahim, said that Meta repeatedly informed it that posts about sexuality, reproductive health and sex education would not be recommended to others because they supposedly violated the platform’s rules. Then the warnings escalated, and Meta began to simply remove its posts.

Examining Meta’s community guidelines allows us to understand why these organisations are so alarmed. Meta says that it allows nudity for “educational”, “medical” and “awareness-raising content”, but that is clearly not what is happening in practice. Under its policies relating to “adult sexual activity”, which it supposedly bans outright, Meta includes “menstruation” alongside “dismemberment”, “cannibalism” and “bestiality”. Something that every woman does monthly—an involuntary biological process connected to the menstrual cycle that is experienced by billions of women—is grouped alongside acts of violence and abuse. What does that tell women about their bodies and how they are being understood by these systems?

This morning, I met representatives of the Eve Appeal, the UK’s leading gynaecological cancer charity, who handed me a letter that they wrote to Meta after attempts to reach it by other avenues failed. They told me that they are extremely concerned about the suppression of some of their content. Last month, The Eve Appeal shared a medically accurate illustration of vulval anatomy on Instagram. It was not pornography or explicit material, but a labelled, educational diagram intended to help people understand their vulva, recognise changes in their cervix and identify symptoms of vulval cancer. The post had a Patient Information Forum tick, the gold standard for health information content. The Eve Appeal has posted the same content three or four times over the last five years, but last month, Instagram removed the post for alleged “nudity or sexual activity”. The Eve Appeal’s account received a warning and its appeal was rejected. Eventually, the post was reinstated, but it was hidden under a “sensitive content” screen, warning users that the image “may be upsetting”. I have seen the image, and it is literally a line drawing. The Eve Appeal received no explanation, and the sensitive content warning has stifled engagement on its post.

One of the Eve Appeal advocates, Zoe, told me,

“When I was diagnosed with vulva cancer, I was clueless. Why? Because I was taught the whole thing was a vagina. The use of pictures with labels of anatomy and names would have been a great help. Penis, prostate, balls, breasts, ovaries, cervix and womb are not taboo, however vulva and vagina, the two rarest of the gynaecological cancers, are being censored and dismissed.”

The Eve Appeal’s educational posts are designed to save lives. Hiding women’s anatomy behind “sensitive content” warnings does not protect women; it silences them.

Such policies can even put lives at risk. My right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), who could not make it here today, has been raising awareness of another extraordinary case involving Thames Valley Air Ambulance. The charity launched a campaign highlighting that one in three women suffering cardiac arrest do not receive CPR before emergency crews arrive. Why? Because bystanders are often hesitant to touch women’s chests, remove bras, expose nipples or remove clothing in an emergency. Thames Valley Air Ambulance created an educational content video using a female CPR mannequin to demonstrate how to apply defibrillator pads correctly. Facebook removed the post and Instagram temporarily deleted it. The reason? The female mannequin breached community standards. Again, after appeal the content was restored with a blurred sensitivity warning. The charity responded:

“If we can’t even share an image of an educational use manikin online without it being deemed ‘inappropriate’, how are we expected to normalise removing a real person’s bra to…save their life?”

As you can imagine, similar content with a male mannequin is never removed or shadow-banned.

Education campaigns like those save lives, yet the algorithms of big tech treat them as indecent. While charities are struggling to share lifesaving information, women’s health businesses are also being throttled. The global femtech market is projected to exceed $97 billion by 2030. It should be one of the great growth sectors of the future; instead, female-led health businesses are facing relentless moderation barriers.

Bodyform’s Vagina Uncensored campaign was censored 22 times in one month across Meta, TikTok, Instagram and X. One advert containing the words “menstrual cycle” and showing a sanitary towel with blood was rejected by Meta unless it carried an 18-plus warning. To remind people, periods start much younger than 18 years old and the questions start even earlier than that. Apparently, period products are considered inappropriate for under-18s despite the fact that the vast majority of girls begin menstruating well before that age.

Sixty-four per cent. of women’s health businesses have lost revenue because of those restrictions. Some businesses report losses of half a million pounds a year. One company said their app downloads collapsed from 250 per week to just 50. Another said years of content creation vanished overnight. Smaller femtech start-ups are the hardest hit. Hanx, a women’s sexual wellness company, said nine out of 10 of its adverts were rejected in the early days, and even now 34% of all its adverts are rejected. Meanwhile, treatments for erectile dysfunction are explicitly permitted under Meta’s advertising rules; women’s libido products are not.

Tommy’s, the pregnancy and baby charity, had a video flagged as inappropriate because it included the word vagina. The video featured a researcher studying the vaginal microbiome to better understand infections linked to premature birth and miscarriage. Again, educational, evidence-based medical information was treated as inappropriate content.

Ordinary women are seeing this happen every day. Influencer Charlotte Emily has more than 90,000 Instagram followers—something I think every politician in this room would like. She said that posts about periods, body image, menopause and women’s health perform dramatically worse than her fashion or lifestyle content. She said that simply using the word “period” instead of euphemisms like “Aunt Flo” reduces visibility. Think about the message that sends to young girls online: that medically accurate language about their own body is unacceptable and that they should hide behind euphemisms and embarrassment.

This is not accidental. Words connected to women’s healthcare are treated as suspect content when they should be treated as healthcare education. That is the same prejudice that women have faced for centuries, simply translated into code. Victorian doctors dismissed women’s suffering as hysteria; today’s algorithms suppress the words that women search when they need to find out whether what is happening to their body is normal. The technology has changed, but the sexism has not.

This censorship has consequences far beyond embarrassment or inconvenience. When trusted information is hidden, misinformation flourishes. The Government have now acknowledged that poor-quality online health information harms women’s outcomes—I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Dr Ahmed) for his work on that—particularly around reproductive health, contraception, miscarriage, menstruation, menopause and infertility. I am glad to see us acknowledging that, but tackling misinformation means nothing if accurate information is suppressed in the first place. If charities are hidden, educators are shadow-banned, doctors are down-ranked and medically approved content about the uterus, cervix, vulva and vagina is blurred, conspiracy theorists and grifters fill the vacuum and women suffer.

I am coming to the end of my speech, but I want to mention that Essity surveyed about 4,000 adults and found that two thirds look online for health advice, while half rely on social media for health and wellbeing information. Among young people, that number is even higher. Overwhelmingly, the public reject this censorship. Nearly eight out of 10 adults said that words such as “vagina”, “period”, “boobs” and “menopause” should not be restricted when used educationally. The public understand what platforms apparently do not: women’s anatomy is not obscene, women’s health is not inappropriate and education is not pornography.

So what must happen now? First, big tech companies must stop hiding behind opaque moderation systems. They must explain how their algorithms operate, why women’s health content is disproportionately targeted and how appeals are reviewed. Secondly, the Government must stop allowing this issue to fall between policy silos. This is simultaneously a health issue, a women’s equality issue, an online safety issue and a digital regulation issue. It requires co-ordinated action between departments, regulators and the affected organisations. Thirdly, platforms should work directly with clinicians, educators and trusted charities to establish verified pathways for evidence-based health content. Finally, we need a cultural shift. Women and girls deserve to talk openly about periods, menopause, infertility, miscarriage, sex, orgasms, puberty and breastfeeding and every other aspect of their health without shame. They deserve medically accurate information without censorship.

Ultimately, this debate is not only about algorithms. It is about power: who gets heard, who gets visibility, whose bodies are treated as acceptable and whose health is considered legitimate. Right now, the message that many women receive online is this: “Your body is inappropriate. Your anatomy is shameful. Your health is controversial.” It is also about autonomy. If we can make informed choices, we have autonomy, but until big tech changes course, women will continue to pay the price in lost education, lost opportunity, lost trust and, in some cases, lost lives. The technology companies have the money and they have the ability; what they lack is the will. It is about time they found it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Darlington]

I thank everyone who joined us for the debate. As the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) said, it is one that we needed to have because so many people do not know about this issue. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Dr Ahmed) for reaffirming that this Government recognise medical misogyny.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies) for reminding us about health advice. We both participated in a debate about endometriosis and adenomyosis not too long ago. In that debate, I said that periods can be uncomfortable but should not be painful, and Members from across the House came up to me afterwards to ask, “Is that true?” Yes, it is true. Periods should not be painful. That shows how we all lack advice on women’s health.

My hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) talked about her children creating embarrassing situations, which I recognise, too. My daughter had a conversation with her friend at the school gates, alongside many other mums and school- children, about her favourite word. She declared, very proudly, that “vulva” was her favourite word. She had learned it at school as appropriate. She knew the difference and told me proudly that I must not misuse “vagina” for “vulva”.

That raises an important point about child abuse, which is a little outside the scope of this debate, but not entirely, because we have to use the correct terms. Police find it extremely frustrating, and it does not meet legal thresholds, when children say, “He touched my cookie,” or, “He touched my ginny.” They need the child to say the right word in order to proceed, and it is another angle in this debate that we must not forget. Using the correct medical terminology allows us to crack down on paedophiles and groomers.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett), whose embarrassment threshold is even lower than mine, which is hard, talked about important post-birth advice and how shadow-banning is particularly problematic because it is deniable. What it says to women, doctors, gynaecologists and femtech entrepreneurs is, “You are just creating content that is not interesting. That is why it does not do well.” Actually, they are creating content that is being deliberately suppressed.

I appreciate what the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett), said about the difference between this and adult content, violent misogyny and racist language. All of that is allowed, yet these terms are not. It shows the power that these platforms have: they say that they cannot suppress these words, but they can. Terms like “rape” or horrible terms that are racist, antisemitic or anti-Islam could be in the same position as women’s health terms, yet they choose for them not to be. I loved her mention of blue liquid. We all remember the blue liquid, and we all remember being surprised, if we were told beforehand, when it was not blue liquid. I imagine that many men were quite surprised, when they got married or entered a relationship, to find that it was not blue. And we certainly were not all out rollerblading.

The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge, asked an important question: should Government dictate what platforms publish? He is right, and the OSA does not say that women’s health information cannot be published. Where I have a bit of an issue with his argument is that, although he is right that it is a commercial decision, it is also a commercial decision that allows the platforms to continue to push pornography, violent material and misogynistic material. If they want to make money off people in this country, we need to make sure they are not doing damage to this country.

[Dr Ben Spencer]

I appreciate where the hon. Lady is coming from, but unless I am wrong, those examples are all within the auspices of the OSA.

[Emily Darlington]

Yes, they would be. I am trying to say that the OSA does not limit this, but it does limit some of the other material. It is important that there is a place for the Government to say what platforms should or should not be able to publish, but they should not micromanage. I agree on that. It should not be like the Lord Chamberlain saying, “Here are the words that you are allowed to use”, or, “The Queen does not approve of those phrases”, but we should be clear that we limit free speech where it has a real, negative impact on individuals or on society, and that we are protecting people because of their age, gender or other protected characteristics.

The shadow Minister raised an important discussion about publishers, plurality and biases that are already in the system. The systems are designed by men and the content, for the most part, focuses on men—not completely, but the algorithms are traditionally designed by men and therefore feed what they think men want, or not even what they want, but what will keep them on the platform the longest. That is their business model.

I appreciate the Minister reiterating the Government’s position that we believe that women should have access to accurate medical information. There are two sides to that: making sure that we suppress inaccurate medical information; and making sure that we have the mechanisms to show what is medically accurate with a tick. We should then make sure that that is the material that people see.

I appreciate what you said about appeal mechanisms, but it is difficult to appeal against shadow-banning, so we need to talk further about that. Again, that is about transparency on algorithms, which you were talking about, and about our dialogue with social media platforms. We need to ask them, what is more damaging? Is it the sexualised content, the misogynistic content or the health advice? We need to have that serious discussion with them.

We also need to think much wider than the four big social media companies. That is not always where people go for such advice. We have heard of experiences on LinkedIn and many other platforms that show that this is a widespread issue. Finally, you are absolutely right about media literacy, so that we know what is good health content and what is based on rubbish science. That is part of how we get through this. [Interruption.] I thank everyone for attending.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

I did not want to interrupt the hon. Lady in what has been an interesting debate, but I remind hon. Members that if you say “you”, that is me—

[Emily Darlington]

You are absolutely right, Mr Stringer. I apologise.

[Graham Stringer (in the Chair)]

I did not want to interrupt the debate, but it is worth remembering for future debates.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of the censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online.