For Leeza Mangaldas’s 2.5 million followers across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, she is a source of accessible and empowering information on sexual health and wellbeing — a subject that remains largely taboo across India and most of the Asia-Pacific region. According to the educator’s own analytics, 65% of her followers on Instagram are men and women between the ages of 18 and 34.

But Mangaldas’ ability to share information that her audiences tell her is useful, and which they say they are unable get elsewhere, is being hampered by changes to how social media platforms are moderated, she told CNN.

Mangaldas told CNN she earns her living from paid partnerships with corporations and international non-profit organizations on her social media platforms, as well as from a recently founded sexual wellbeing brand. She began posting on YouTube in 2017, just as India’s #Metoo movement was starting and ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision the following year to decriminalize homosexuality, she said.

”I feel like I was one of several people at that time who were frustrated by this state of affairs when it comes to sexual and reproductive health and rights. And what I was doing on social media connected with a lot of people,” Mangaldas said. “There was positively a need for change.”

However, CNN spoke to 9 content material creators and sexual well being specialists in South and Southeast Asia who’re elevating the alarm, warning that their academic content material is being more and more censored.

Among the creators CNN spoke to, eight shared a number of examples of content material being restricted or taken down and of being unable to run adverts on some sex-ed posts.

Caught within the crosshairs of the platforms’ makes an attempt to handle the proliferation of dangerous content material round intercourse, educators’ posts are being pushed behind sensitivity filters and inaccurately thought of to be pornographic materials, based on the content material creators. CNN spoke with six younger folks throughout the area who’re largely disadvantaged of formal intercourse training, who instructed CNN that they’re afraid of creating ill-informed choices about their sexuality, sexual practices or defend themselves in abusive sexual conditions due to this censorship.

Mangaldas and different digital intercourse educators are calling for improved content material moderation, transparency, and extra direct communication from the social media platforms on how they’re making use of their insurance policies. “We can work together instead of against each other,” she mentioned.

Pressured to vary ‘delicate content material’

The sex-ed influencers, specialists from social change organizations and non-profits CNN spoke to accused social media platforms of arbitrary and inconsistent crackdowns which have pressured them into self-censoring, leading to them deleting posts and, for instance, avoiding references to human genitals.

Mangaldas believes the regulatory processes utilized by platforms are unable to differentiate precisely between nudity, sexual solicitation, pornography, artwork, and academic content material. “So even when you are not actually violating their guidelines, often content gets wrongly flagged,” she instructed CNN.

Mangaldas mentioned she began to note extra censorship in content material moderation on Instagram, the place she is essentially the most energetic, when the platform launched Sensitive Content Control in 2021.

The sensitivity function is an embedded perform which permits customers to filter doubtlessly upsetting content material resembling posts which may be “sexually suggestive or violent” in their Explore tab which shows recommendations from accounts users do not follow. Users over the age of 18 are able to manually tailor and broaden the amount of ”sensitive content” they wish to see.

In late July, Mangaldas received a notification from Instagram saying her account couldn’t “be proven to non-followers”, leading her to delete nine posts that had been flagged to be ”eligible for recommendation” again. Being restricted from reaching non-followers is also known as a shadow ban. The deleted posts include a video in which she talks about using lubricant and another explaining why some people cry after sex.

She told CNN that after this experience, she began to censor herself more, for example spelling the word ”porn” using a mix of Hindi and English when talking about false expectations about sex and noticed a huge uptick in reach to followers and non-followers.

She also gave the example of a cropped image from a piece of 19th century French art showing a nude bottom that she originally posted in 2020 but reused this year. The new post was blocked, Mangaldas said, though Meta’s policy states that nudity in photos of “work, sculptures, and different artwork that depicts nude figures” is acceptable. The older post is still visible.

Online healthcare network Women First Digital (WFD)’s director, Tisha Gopalakrishnan, also spoke of ”rampant” censorship on her organization’s Facebook pages over the past two years. “It’s affecting operations, it is affecting visibility, it is affecting affect to a a lot larger extent than what we will take care of,” she instructed CNN.

Her group runs three digital platforms to offer data and sources about secure abortion and pleasure-based contraception practices not solely within the US however around the globe, with the best site visitors coming from India. A mixed whole of three.7 million visits got here from the South Asian nation between 2015 and 2022 — greater than 3 times larger than the 1.3 million visits from the US, based on WFD knowledge.

Gopalakrishnan believes censorship of abortion information stems from US domestic political affairs, even when operating in other regions.

”Abortion content has historically always been censored on Meta platforms globally, and the overturning of Roe v Wade just made things go from bad to worse,” Gopalakrishnan mentioned. “In general, it is our experience that Meta policies are more reflective of current US political affairs than the local legislative and cultural contexts of the countries they serve.”

After getting posts eliminated on Facebook and Instagram in 2018 and 2020 respectively, the founding father of India-based sex-ed basis Pratisandhi, Niyati Sharma, mentioned her group needed to shift to a extra inventive method to content material that moved away from ”graphic diagrams or specific imagery associated to sexuality” to ones which can be extra academic, and centered extra on prevention and safety, she mentioned.

”For occasion, now we have a lesser concentrate on issues like intercourse toys however extra on hygiene or myths. Changing how we phrased the identical content material made a distinction and likewise made it simpler to enchantment in case posts have been restricted. We additionally modified our graphics to be a little bit extra summary since flagging algorithms do not categorize these as nudity,” Sharma told CNN.

Getting content unblocked is hit or miss, multiple content creators told CNN, adding they rarely got a human response to their appeals.

“There’s a way of acceptance, proper?” Mangaldas said. “Like, OK, I want to make use of this platform. If no human being can repair this for me and I’m reliant on automated options, then my finest wager is to simply delete [content].”

The risk of miscategorizing content has been known for some time, and is, in part, explained by a lack of awareness among content moderators.

Platforms say it’s hard to get moderation right

When CNN asked to speak with them about content restrictions, and the challenges facing sex-ed content creators, none of the major social media platforms agreed to be interviewed. Most did not speak on the record, but did provide information on background and talked about the difficulty they face with moderation, as large corporations, serving multiple markets.

Elena Hernandez, a spokesperson for YouTube said: “YouTube Health’s mission is to extend equitable entry to high-quality well being content material, and that features sexual well being. YouTube creators assist make public well being and sexual training resonate with folks around the globe, and we’re at all times engaged on new methods to raise and prominently function credible well being sources on the platform.”

As for TikTok, according to the company’s spokesperson, its rules allow reproductive health and sex education content, such as content on the use of birth control and abortion, discussed in medical language. But they also said that moderating at scale means mistakes are sometimes made, and as such, explained the company will continue to invest in improving its systems, in training teams, and making it easy for creators to appeal moderation decisions.

‘How would people like me know about sex?’

The paper highlights how poor knowledge and attitudes are linked to high-risk sexual behaviors and practices, listing examples of the prevalence of intimate partner violence and teenage pregnancy being associated with poor awareness of sexually transmitted infections and of HIV and AIDS.

Indeed, efforts by the central government to introduce a national sex education curriculum in 2005, 2007 and 2016 were met with opposition from several states who said it undermined Indian culture and values.

It is against the backdrop of this charged political atmosphere, coupled with high social media use — albeit less for women — that social media platforms have become relatively safe, and effective, sites to access sexual and reproductive health information.

For 30-year-old Natasha Vijayalaxmi in Chennai, on-line educators and organizations have been an enormous supply of psychological and bodily help.

She instructed CNN in regards to the dysphoria she felt, when she was youthful, in the direction of sure components of her physique, and in the direction of the gender assigned to her at delivery. As a transgender girl and survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she mentioned her physique had typically been fetishized. As a results of these experiences, she developed unfavourable perceptions about intercourse. But on-line, she mentioned, she discovered folks like her she might relate to and allow her to be taught extra about herself and the way to think about intercourse in additional constructive methods.

“The sense that their vision of the world is something that is resonating with you…you find a lot of meaning in that,” Vijayalaxmi mentioned, referring to Mangaldas’ work, earlier than including: “It’s really important (to have) greater awareness of sex positivity in this country in general because there’s so much stigma around it.”

Learning in regards to the sex-ed content material creators have confronted, city designer Manomi was indignant: “How would people like me know about sex if these people don’t put up content?,” she requested. ”I strongly oppose it.”

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Read other stories on sexual education from around the world

This article is part of The Talk, a series of stories, each produced by a different newsroom or team, painting a picture of the state of sex education around the world. During the month of October 2023, stories will be published by CNN As Equals, Kontinentalist, the Impact Newsletter, Unbias the News, Nadja Media, Suno India and BehanBox.