CoP Overview and introduction:
What happens when governments, search engines, AI, or online platforms block access to SRHR topics, censor information, or punish you for sharing SRHR information? Or when opposition groups publish misinformation deliberately meant to confuse, misdirect, and stop individuals from accessing accurate SRHR knowledge? What messages do social media platforms share when they censor female reproductive health and nipples, sexual pleasure, sex work, and menstrual health topics? How are biases programmed into digital systems which perpetuate and amplify systems of oppression? It is questions like these, which SNI’s digital rights and SRHR CoP asks.
As Share-Net International enters their 10th anniversary celebration year in 2024, we look to the digital future of SNI’s network and member needs, and the increasing digitalisation of SRHR information. With access to reliable, accurate, and quality SRHR information at the forefront of the SRHR agenda, digital spaces are increasingly prominent and necessary for SRHR practitioners and offer valuable access to the information which the SRHR world communicates.
Yet in many locations globally, SRHR content is censored, restricted and blocked across many digital spaces. As private sector ‘big tech’ corporations like Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), AI auto-translation services, and other emerging platforms and online services mediate content according to their own agendas; SRHR information on CSE, sexual pleasure, sex work(ers), abortion, LGBTQIA+ topics, female reproductive health, and gender diversity, face increasing restrictions, targeted harassment, and blockages online. Simultaneously, dis- and misinformation on SRHR topics is increasingly apparent; highly organised pro-life and abortion opposition groups collaborate to misdirect people seeking accurate abortion care information through loopholes in technology, anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-transgender groups unite through digital means, and technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TF-GBV) and targeted, networked harassment is increasingly common.
While we witness the digital rights movement growing and its presence increasing, the focus, research, and organisations contributing to this space are often based-in and examining digital rights in the European and northern American context. In SNI’s Digital Rights and SRHR CoP, we intend to broaden the digital rights focus to include more LMIC’s and the global majority through utilising SNI’s global network and reaching SRHR practitioners in over 70 countries. The digital rights and SRHR CoP intends to map, uncover, and highlight Digital Rights violations that SRHR practitioners, individuals, and organisations are facing globally, producing an overview of topics that the CoP can address and work on, as the iCoP develops.
CoP objectives:
Key CoP Resources or Publications
None as yet
Key annual CoP activities
CoP launch date
April 2024
CoP Contact
For more information about the CoP, please contact Rhian Farnworth –r.farnworth@kit.nl