A research based exploration of how online violence, harassment, and emerging technologies are contributing to self censorship among women in the Western Balkans. The piece examines how fear of digital abuse can discourage women from speaking publicly, participating in political debate, or engaging in activism, and considers what this growing silence means for freedom of expression, political participation, and democracy across the region.
In the week before İstanbul Pride, the accounts began to vanish. Queer organizations faced with an unexpected error message while trying to access their social media accounts. Inside Turkiye, the Instagram pages of Kaos GL, İstanbul Pride Week, İstanbul Trans Pride Week, Ankara Pride, and İzmir Pride simply stopped existing
I think you might know the feeling: The conversation you were in just turned to static. Your cheeks flush. Your stomach drops. You hear yourself say, What the fuck?
Your account has been erased.
I've spent years talking to artists, activists, and creators whose work has disappeared in that gut-wrenching instant. No amount of experience, careful wording, backup plans or familiarity with platform rules really prepares you for it. It always feels surreal. One second you're there; the next you're gone, trying to prove you ever existed at all.
Amid an escalating crackdown on LGBTQI+ communities in Türkiye, Repro Uncensored, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), ÜniKuir Association and Kaos GL are raising alarm over the suspension of more than 120 LGBTQI+ and feminist social media accounts across major social media platforms beginning on 19 June 2026, according to documentation compiled by Turkish civil society organizations.
Despite years of online censorship, sex workers are not flocking to decentralised social media. Drawing on interviews conducted at Berlin's SXFestival Expo 2026, this article explores why governance alone is not enough—and why audience, discoverability and economic opportunity continue to keep creators tied to Big Tech platforms.
Digital censorship or digital suppression refers to platform practices that limit the visibility or availability of important information online. This includes content removals, account suspensions, shadowbanning, and other forms of algorithmic suppression.
Social media has become one of the primary ways people learn about health, relationships, and their bodies. Increasingly, it is also where people encounter information—and misinformation—about contraception and reproductive healthcare.
Fable 5, the “most powerful AI model ever made”, was released by Anthropic on June 9, then promptly retracted just three days later. While it was live, Fable 5 downgraded results about gender affirming healthcare information to Opus 4.8, its former leading model at the time.
The cancellation comes at a time of growing global rollback on fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, access to information, and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Many organisations including Repro Uncensored and International Planned Parenthood Federation, were set to speak at RightsCon, with dozens of sessions focused on censorship, platform governance, and access to reproductive health information online.
From the exclusion of the Gnostic texts to the ranking of content online, institutions have long determined which narratives are visible, legitimate, and preserved—and which are buried, discredited, or erased.
A collective framework for rethinking how platforms govern sex, sexuality, and visibility online, outlining concrete principles for building more equitable, accountable, and sex-positive digital environments.
From facial recognition bias to AI-generated sexual violence and reproductive health censorship, digital systems increasingly shape how women’s bodies and voices appear online. As platforms prioritize engagement and profit, algorithmic infrastructures are amplifying exploitation, surveillance, and the silencing of feminist and reproductive health information.
We interviewed artists in China about censorship and self-censorship in artistic practice. Their reflections describe a system shaped less by explicit prohibition and more by uncertainty, where creators often anticipate consequences and quietly adjust expression in advance.
When platforms label marginalized voices as “dangerous,” censorship becomes violence. In this essay, Vianney Harelly writes about art, borders, Palestine solidarity, and the real cost of being visible under digital censorship.
An essay on how algorithms, disinformation, and generative AI distort reality in moments of violence. When truth is overwritten by hyperreality, victims are forced to exist in both the real and the fabricated at once.
Artist Violet shares a firsthand account of gendered censorship, algorithmic visibility, and AI driven extraction, examining how platforms shape creative labor and safety online.
Big Tech platforms claim to allow queer, sexual, and reproductive health content, yet their automated systems routinely erase it. Across Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and beyond, accounts are deleted, content is demonetised, and pleasure-affirming information is mislabelled as “adult,” while misogynistic and male-centred sexual content continues to thrive.
As the UK’s Online Safety Act moves into enforcement, “safety” is increasingly achieved through removal rather than protection. Sex workers, queer communities, and sexual and reproductive health advocates are losing visibility, income, and access to essential information under compliance driven moderation.
When an environmental disaster struck Indonesia, the world barely noticed. As floods swallowed entire communities and thousands were displaced, the crisis failed to register beyond local networks. This silence was not accidental. It was produced by an ecosystem where algorithms, media concentration, and political power quietly determine which lives are seen and which are rendered invisible.
DIGITAL CENSORSHIP & PLATFORM CONTROL
Tracking how platforms, algorithms, and moderation systems silence feminist, queer, and reproductive health voices across regions.
CARE, ACCESS & COMMUNITY RESILIENCE
Documenting how communities build care networks, mutual aid, and survival strategies when systems fail or actively harm them.
Two weeks ago, we participated in the Berlin Process Gender Equality Forum in Sarajevo, joining more than 150 representatives from governments, parliaments, academia, civil society, gender equality institutions, international organizations, and development partners from across the Western Balkans
Japanese visual artist Minori Murata works across CGI, video, installation, and interactive media to explore the relationships between technology, consumer culture, ecology, and collective belief. Known for creating immersive digital worlds that blur the boundaries between nature and the virtual, Murata’s work examines the systems that shape what we see and what remains hidden.
At Women Deliver 2026 Conference, a new declaration frames gender inequality as a systemic crisis and calls for a rebalancing of power across institutions. But does it go far enough in addressing who controls visibility, information, and participation today?
In Benin, abortion is legal under one of West Africa’s most progressive laws, yet access remains uneven. Financial barriers, inconsistent pricing, and gaps in implementation continue to shape whether women and girls can actually obtain care, turning a legal right into a deeply unequal reality.
In Leticia, Colombia, where healthcare often travels by air or river, cervical cancer screening reveals what access looks like beyond telemedicine. This piece explores how prevention, infrastructure, and follow up care operate in one of the country’s most geographically isolated regions, and what it means to build health access where systems are limited but the need is urgent.
This piece examines the Wikimedia Community User Group Senegal and how feminist librarians are working to document Senegalese knowledge, archives, and languages across Wikipedia and other open platforms.
A research and community intervention project piloting HPV self-screening in cultural spaces to decentralize preventative reproductive healthcare and expand equitable access in partnership with ProDx Health.
The backlash against Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance is not really about politics—it’s about who is allowed to exist publicly without being punished for it. Labeling marginalized people as “too political” has become a tool of erasure, one that mirrors deeper structures of state violence, censorship, and control. From ICE raids to reproductive coercion, the Super Bowl is not a refuge from politics, but a stage where power decides whose lives are visible, and whose suffering is ignored.
A personal account of the Wang Fuk Court fire in Hong Kong, tracing how preventable disaster, information control, and political pressure shape what can be seen, said, and remembered. The essay centers the often-invisible care work of migrant women and communities who sustain life amid silence and neglect.
In a region where Indigenous spiritual systems were long silenced, Vodun Days 2026 reclaim public space as a site of cultural resistance. By affirming Vodun as living knowledge rather than folklore, the festival challenges historical and contemporary forms of erasure shaping how West African cultures are seen, valued, or ignored.
Artist Violet shares a firsthand account of gendered censorship, algorithmic visibility, and AI driven extraction, examining how platforms shape creative labor and safety online.
Self-censorship does not emerge from silence alone. It is produced through moral regulation, digital backlash, and the constant calculation of risk. In faith-based SRHR contexts, speaking openly can trigger social punishment, platform suppression, and personal harm.
When an environmental disaster struck Indonesia, the world barely noticed. As floods swallowed entire communities and thousands were displaced, the crisis failed to register beyond local networks. This silence was not accidental. It was produced by an ecosystem where algorithms, media concentration, and political power quietly determine which lives are seen and which are rendered invisible.
Visibility on social media does not equal access. Platforms are built around speed, constant output, and algorithmic reward systems that are not designed for disabled people.
Erotic artists sit at the frontlines of content policing. Through SPUNK ROCK’s story, this piece examines the patterns of moderation that disproportionately target queer and body-positive creators and the emotional and economic toll of sustaining an erotic practice under platform surveillance
At Columbia University, students are organizing to close a critical gap in on-campus reproductive healthcare. Over the past two years, members of the Reproductive Justice Collective of New York and Planned Parenthood Generation Action have built a student-led emergency contraception distribution network and launched a comprehensive survey to assess barriers to accessing EC on campus.
Censorship of sex education in Cambodia has shifted from euphemisms and stigma in everyday life to new digital suppression in Khmer. As algorithms increasingly flag SRHR content, accurate information is being silenced, leaving young people without the knowledge they need for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights
The primary challenge facing these communities is that anti-rights and anti-SRHR forces are in power in both countries. This not only strips people of access to their rights but also cuts them off from the information they need to understand those rights.
The Every Voice Bill is survivor-led legislation that’s reshaping how colleges and universities address sexual violence. Rooted in lived experience, it builds crucial protections into state law, holding institutions accountable while centering the needs of students, not school reputations.
DATA, SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY
Exposing how personal data is extracted, monetized, and weaponized, especially in relation to bodies, sexuality, and health.
Facebook launched in 2004. By 2009 it had 300 million users. Today it has over three billion monthly active users and data going back nearly two decades. That data includes not just what people posted but what they liked, who they were friends with, how their social networks shifted, how their political views evolved, what they searched for, what ads they clicked, what they scrolled past. It is the most comprehensive longitudinal record of human ideological development ever assembled. For hundreds of millions of people, it begins at the moment they first encountered the internet.
The Trump administration has failed to move the needle on its goal of boosting US declining birth rates and reversing the "fertility crisis," which Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy recently called "a threat not only to our economy, to our national security," and Dr. Oz said has left a third of Americans "under-babied."
Meta quietly announced via the help center it is removing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) from Instagram messages on May 8, 2026. E2EE messages and calls ensure only you and the people that you're communicating with, can see or listen to your messages, and no one else can.
An essay on how algorithms, disinformation, and generative AI distort reality in moments of violence. When truth is overwritten by hyperreality, victims are forced to exist in both the real and the fabricated at once.
Digital systems are often framed as neutral tools, yet they are built from choices that shape whose voices are amplified and whose are erased. Drawing on cybernetics and anarchist thought, this piece examines how feedback, power, and governance operate within digital infrastructures and why reclaiming collective agency over these systems is essential for justice, accountability, and care.
Examining how legislation, regulation, and state power shape and often restrict freedom, bodily autonomy, and access to information.
LAW, POLICY & ACCOUNTABILITY
This week the Senate Commerce Committee voted on two bills sold as ways to protect kids online. KOSA (Kids Online Safety Act) passed unanimously and is now heading to the senate floor for a vote. The SCREEN (Shielding Children’s Retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net) Act which details a requirement to verify your identity with a government ID just to use half the internet, narrowly failed to advance.
The Trump administration has failed to move the needle on its goal of boosting US declining birth rates and reversing the "fertility crisis," which Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy recently called "a threat not only to our economy, to our national security," and Dr. Oz said has left a third of Americans "under-babied."
Amid Repro Uncensored and Dutch Queer Groups’ Landmark Legal Action Against Meta, Australian Organizations Warn Similar Cases Could Build Toward Future Legal Action
Repro Uncensored, Bits of Freedom and Dutch Queer Organizations Issue Legal Demand Against Meta, Escalating Pressure for a European Class Action
At Women Deliver 2026 Conference, a new declaration frames gender inequality as a systemic crisis and calls for a rebalancing of power across institutions. But does it go far enough in addressing who controls visibility, information, and participation today?
At CSW70, one thing was clear: without civic space, rights cannot be defended. As backlash grows globally, the ability to organize, speak, and access information is increasingly under threat, especially online. Protecting civic space is essential to protecting gender justice.
The backlash against Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance is not really about politics—it’s about who is allowed to exist publicly without being punished for it. Labeling marginalized people as “too political” has become a tool of erasure, one that mirrors deeper structures of state violence, censorship, and control. From ICE raids to reproductive coercion, the Super Bowl is not a refuge from politics, but a stage where power decides whose lives are visible, and whose suffering is ignored.
As the United States withdrew from the Universal Periodic Review and altered how reproductive rights are reported in official human rights documents, civil society actors developed alternative forms of documentation to ensure evidence of harm, lived experience, and legal analysis remained part of the public record.
An essay on how algorithms, disinformation, and generative AI distort reality in moments of violence. When truth is overwritten by hyperreality, victims are forced to exist in both the real and the fabricated at once.
When platforms label marginalized voices as “dangerous,” censorship becomes violence. In this essay, Vianney Harelly writes about art, borders, Palestine solidarity, and the real cost of being visible under digital censorship.
Latino communities turn to the internet for clarity on immigration, reproductive rights, and civic life, only to find their voices buried. As platforms suppress Spanish-language education and amplify misinformation, access to truth is quietly reshaped.
Big Tech platforms claim to allow queer, sexual, and reproductive health content, yet their automated systems routinely erase it. Across Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and beyond, accounts are deleted, content is demonetised, and pleasure-affirming information is mislabelled as “adult,” while misogynistic and male-centred sexual content continues to thrive.
As the UK’s Online Safety Act moves into enforcement, “safety” is increasingly achieved through removal rather than protection. Sex workers, queer communities, and sexual and reproductive health advocates are losing visibility, income, and access to essential information under compliance driven moderation.
This research documents how reproductive health, sex worker-led, and queer organizations across Europe continue to face censorship despite the Digital Services Act. It shows how appeal and enforcement mechanisms remain inaccessible in practice, leaving lawful communities without effective protection.
This research, conducted by Repro Uncensored, exposes a global escalation in the censorship of abortion access, sexual health, and queer content across Meta platforms, revealing opaque enforcement practices, ineffective appeals mechanisms, and material harm.
Research with us!
Researchers, activists, and organizations: join us in exploring the intersection of reproductive health, digital rights, artificial intelligence, and more. Together, we can tackle challenges like online censorship of abortion information, access to care in underserved communities, and advocacy for digital freedom.