She told CNN that her biology teacher in her home village in the southern Indian state of Kerala had spoken to the class about sexual intercourse just once and she didn’t recall learning much from that. So, when she found herself uncomfortable with her sexual encounters with her husband, she struggled to explain why or name what had been happening to her.
”I didn’t know about marital rape back then. I didn’t know even the term existed,” the now 32-year-old said, explaining that her husband never sought consent, nor did she realize at the time how much it might have changed her experience if he had.
Still, Manomi — whose name has been changed due to possible backlash for speaking out — was so unhappy that she says her mother “took the initiative” to help her daughter file for divorce, just three months after her wedding.
The young woman moved to the state capital and became an urban designer, but it would be years before she learned, through the social media posts of online sexual health educator Leeza Mangaldas, that sex should be “consensual, safe and pleasurable.” These “three things Leeza repeats everywhere,” Manomi said.
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 definitely a desire for change.”
Today the 33-year-old, who lives in Goa, is one of swathes of digital creators, educators and health service providers across the Asia-Pacific. Through social media, they are working to reach the one billion young people in the region with information that various United Nations agencies call “digital sexuality education”: content focusing on safe sex (and safe online) practices, sexuality, relationships and gender.
The UN Population Fund, UNFPA, has for years made the connection between the quality of the information women receive and their ability to make their own decisions about sex, contraception, and their overall health. Recent evidence shows that “young people are extensively using the digital environment as a key source of information about sexuality” which does not replace but complements classroom sexuality education, according to a UNESCO report.
However, CNN spoke to nine content creators and sexual health experts in South and Southeast Asia who are raising the alarm, warning that their educational content is being increasingly censored.
Among the creators CNN spoke to, eight shared multiple examples of content being restricted or taken down and of being unable to run ads on some sex-ed posts.
Caught in the crosshairs of the platforms’ attempts to address the proliferation of harmful content around sex, educators’ posts are being pushed behind sensitivity filters and inaccurately considered to be pornographic material, according to the content creators. CNN spoke with six young people across the region who are largely deprived of formal sex education, who told CNN that they are afraid of making ill-informed decisions about their sexuality, sexual practices or how to protect themselves in abusive sexual situations because of this censorship.
Mangaldas and other digital sex educators are calling for improved content moderation, transparency, and more direct communication from the social media platforms on how they are applying their policies. “We can work together instead of against each other,” she said.
Pressured to change ‘sensitive content’
The sex-ed influencers, experts 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, resulting in them deleting posts and, for example, avoiding references to human genitals.
Across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok — where digital creators and organizations told CNN they suffered the most censorship — sexual activities and services are banned, and content that depicts sexual pleasure or gratification, including sex toys or fetishes, are either denied advertisements or banned. These policies come at odds with sex educators who are trying to explain to their followers about safe usage of sex toys or about female orgasms, the content creators explained.
Mangaldas believes the regulatory processes used by platforms are unable to distinguish accurately between nudity, sexual solicitation, pornography, art, and educational content. “So even when you are not actually violating their guidelines, often content gets wrongly flagged,” she told CNN.
Mangaldas said she started to notice more censorship in content moderation on Instagram, where she is the most active, when the platform introduced Sensitive Content Control in 2021.
The sensitivity feature is an embedded function which allows users to filter potentially upsetting content such as posts that 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 shown 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 “paintings, sculptures, and other art 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’s affecting visibility, it’s affecting impact to a much greater extent than what we can deal with,” she told CNN.
Her organization runs three digital platforms to provide information and resources about safe abortion and pleasure-based contraception practices not only in the US but around the world, with the highest traffic coming from India. A combined total of 3.7 million visits came from the South Asian country between 2015 and 2022 — more than three times higher than the 1.3 million visits from the US, according to WFD data.
In June, the non-profit submitted a public https://elementlagu.com comment to Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) to appeal several takedowns, one of which is the takedown of their entire ‘How to Use’ page on Facebook, which provides advice on self-managed abortion pills.