Women’s Health and Wellbeing: Online Censorship

Samantha Niblett Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Westminster Hall

[Samantha Niblett (South Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I apologise for running late, Mr Stringer; I had an emergency constituent issue.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) not only for securing this vital debate on the censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online, but for her ongoing campaigning on this issue. I was delighted to join her roundtable on the subject with Essity. We need strong voices in this place and, my word, I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s strong voice on this issue.

We are here to talk about women’s health, so I will focus on that, but I want to make it clear that we are all fierce advocates for men’s health as well. It is clear that women’s health is being pushed to the edges of the internet by systems that fail to distinguish between pornography and public health. Posts about periods, endometriosis, fertility, pregnancy loss, pelvic pain and menopause—ordinary facts about ordinary bodies—are down-ranked, age-gated or quietly buried, while explicit content remains only a tap away. This is not a harmless quirk: it reflects design choices made by tech companies, often heavily influenced by men, the male lens and the male view of the world.

As founder of Labour: Women in Tech, I have been campaigning for years to get more women into the industry and creating tech that is made to serve more people. More recently, I have launched a campaign for age-appropriate, inclusive and lifelong sex education with Cindy Gallop of MakeLoveNotPorn and the MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, a platform for creating the Google of sex education. Talking of tech, I know she is watching this debate live online—so hello, Cindy Gallop.

We want to take the shame, guilt and embarrassment—all of which are perpetuated by shadow banning—out of talking about sex. My hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) mentioned some embarrassing things that can happen in public, and she is a fierce advocate for giving parts of the body their proper anatomical names.

I will focus on the huge role that sexual wellbeing plays in our health and happiness. We cannot rest on our laurels and assume that everyone had relationships and sex education in school. In fact, completing formal education at 16—RSE is not mandatory to 18—does not mean that the relationships and sex education provided to a student was adequate. A recent Youth Select Committee report found that relationships and sex education in UK schools is woefully lacking, particularly for LGBTQ young people. Like many adults, young people therefore turn to the internet and social media to fill the gaps.

When the online classroom censors the syllabus, we fail people twice: first by not teaching them enough, and then by hiding the very information they seek. These failures play out across a lifetime. After cancer treatment, for example, a woman may experience significant changes, such as early menopause, pain, vaginal dryness and changes in desire. She may look for practical, compassionate advice, but find it flagged as “sexual content”. That delivers not support but silence.

When it comes to pregnancy and the months after birth, evidence-based guidance on pelvic floor recovery or painful sex is frequently hidden behind warnings, while myths about “bouncing back” flow freely, leaving new mothers to stitch together care in the dark. Content on perimenopause and the menopause, an experience that will touch half the population, explaining brain fog, joint pain, dyspareunia—genital pain before, during or after sex—and the role of hormone replacement therapy is throttled by filters that bury the very help that women need.

Censorship compounds existing inequalities. Disabled people receive very little support around having a healthy sex life. Even straightforward, evidence-based facts about masturbation helping some people to relieve menstrual cramps are too often treated as indecent rather than educational. On top of that, creators and clinicians feel compelled to contort language to avoid suppression, writing “seggs” instead of “sex”, or “b00bs” instead of “breasts”. This is not merely absurd; for some neurodivergent people, misspelled language is confusing and exclusionary, making essential health information harder to understand and access.

We should also acknowledge the pressures on the very people trying to provide education. Some sex educators on mainstream platforms, especially TikTok and Instagram, feel forced to use coded or alternative language to get any reach at all.

Milly Evans, who has nearly half a million followers on TikTok, told me she never knows what rules might be imposed from one day to the next. She has had her account suspended; had stretches where algorithms would allow her to reach only existing followers, therefore not expanding her reach; and had periods of outright shadow banning, meaning that no one saw what she posted. When educators must choose between clarity and visibility, the public loses. This is especially true for those who rely on free, accessible information.

There is a gendered double standard that we must confront: women are penalised for posting clinically accurate information that men can share with far fewer consequences. Cindy Gallop’s “Fairness in the Feed” campaign on LinkedIn highlighted this starkly, with women who changed their profile gender to male seeing their posts reach further. When the same message travels differently depending on who says it, bias is no longer incidental: it is embedded in the system. Of course, LinkedIn denies it, but I say look at the actions, not the words.

The knock-on effects are not only personal but are economic. Women’s health companies, start-ups, clinics, apps and retailers struggle to reach the very people they exist to serve because their content and advertising are throttled. Lucy Litwack is the owner and CEO of Coco de Mer, a company that helps women with desire and sexual pleasure, which are central to health and wellbeing. She said that she cannot even run promotions for her lingerie on Facebook because her company also happens to sell sex toys. That is not just a ban on the promotion of sex toys, which is questionable in itself—I do not see why that should be banned—but a blanket block on lingerie because of association.

If responsible brands cannot speak to consenting adults about lawful products, innovation is chilled and growth is starved. The founders then walk into investor rooms and are told, “Sorry, your reach is too small and your traction is too thin.” The system is creating problems and then punishing those who try to solve them.

Shadow banning is especially corrosive because it is deniable. There is no clear refusal, only diminishing visibility, fewer views and a creeping signal that plain speech about women’s bodies is unwelcome. The predictable result is self-censorship: creators soften terms, clinicians dilute clarity, charities tiptoe, and the space left in respect of accuracy is quickly filled by misinformation and predatory products.

All that is why, alongside Cindy, I have launched a public consultation alongside our campaign for lifelong sex education. It is not a fixed blueprint but a genuine invitation for contributors to share their evidence and lived experience. We are asking people to tell us what is working well, what needs to change and where they would like the agenda to land.

In the spirit of listening, I will outline some ideas that people might suggest we explore together. People might call for greater transparency from and due process for platforms, including through clear rules for sexual and reproductive health content. That would mean having explanations when posts are limited and timely, and human-reviewed appeals so that educational material is not swept up by blunt filters and biased enforcement.

People might propose a mechanism to recognise verified educational and clinical content, thereby allowing NHS bodies, registered charities and qualified clinicians to label health education so that it is not misclassified as adult content, while still meeting robust safety standards.

People might ask for independent scrutiny and measurement so that we can track the visibility of sexual health content for women and men, LGBTQ communities, neurodivergent people and disabled people. That would allow us to compare enforcement patterns across genders and communities, audit algorithms and training data for bias, test whether changes actually help people to find the information that they need, and help responsible women’s health companies and educators to reach them.

People might also recommend partnerships that place trusted resources where people already are, such as GP surgeries, workplaces, community centres, schools and the large public platforms. That would make accurate guidance available at key life stages such as puberty, when making decisions about consent and contraception, pregnancy and postpartum recovery, illness and treatment, and the menopause transition.

What I have outlined are not conclusions; they are suggestions. They are invitations to shape a programme that is built with the public, rather than being handed down to them. Yet whatever solutions emerge will succeed only if the channels that carry our information stop choking on the words that we need to use.

Censorship by algorithm is still censorship, and when it hides women’s health, it harms half the country—quietly, cumulatively and needlessly. We should not accept an internet where it is easier to encounter pornography than to find clinically sound advice about pelvic pain, menopause, cancer recovery or accessible sexual wellbeing for disabled or neurodivergent people. We should not accept rules that police women’s language while allowing men to say the same things more frequently, nor a market that punishes health founders and educators for trying to solve the very problems that the system creates.

The consultation is open and we want people to share what already works, identify the gaps and point us to changes that would make the greatest difference. Together, we can bring women’s health out of the algorithmic shadows and into the light.