Emily Darlington
MP for Milton Keynes Central · Labour · United Kingdom
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I have rewritten my speech because I do not want to repeat all the things that have been said. I think we are in agreement, although we may have different perspectives. I want to take us back to 80 years ago, to a country house a few miles from Milton Keynes in my constituency.”
“British AI firms need three things to succeed: customers who will buy their products, the ability to increase supply to meet demand, and a USP that British AI is the most trusted. The Government can help with all three. First, we have to act as a good customer. Why should those NHS and MOD contracts not go to British AI firms?”
“With the activist Government in the US turning off technology and restricting its availability outside the US, that puts at risk not only our NHS but, most importantly, the defence of our realm against Russia, for which others may have more sympathy than we do.”
“Britain is standing at another one of those moments, as we see with our economy and our military tech coming together and pushing forward either for the good of the nation or for its ultimate damage. The potential benefits of artificial intelligence are enormous, and not only for the private sector.”
“We are overly reliant: despite the fact that we part-own Crown Hosting, that accounts for only 6% of public sector data; the rest is nearly all on Amazon Web Services, which is a significant risk. We need to look at how we diffuse the supply of compute power—the underused capacity—to increase that.”
“A maker exports its products, services and ideas around the world, as we did in world war two, but the UK is at risk of becoming an AI taker and simply handing over the keys to giant US tech firms that are buying up our best young AI companies.”
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“This partnership model of an industrial strategy is mission-driven, creates public trust, evaluates the impact on society and creates opportunities for our ideas and innovation to flourish. That is something we did with the innovations at Bletchley Park. We need to become an innovation leader again—an AI maker, not just an AI taker, which puts us at risk.”
“We are overly reliant: despite the fact that we part-own Crown Hosting, that accounts for only 6% of public sector data; the rest is nearly all on Amazon Web Services, which is a significant risk. We need to look at how we diffuse the supply of compute power—the underused capacity—to increase that. Finally, we need to increase AI take-up across British businesses by building trusted products. The British Standards Institution is at the heart of that. It does not always have to be about regulation; it can be about standards that lift everything up. What attracts the world to the BSI is that it is known for doing that and its standards become international, so we get first-market advantage.”
“British AI firms need three things to succeed: customers who will buy their products, the ability to increase supply to meet demand, and a USP that British AI is the most trusted. The Government can help with all three. First, we have to act as a good customer. Why should those NHS and MOD contracts not go to British AI firms? Not only would that increase trust, but those products would be developed in a way that meets our needs; we would not be buying something that had been developed elsewhere. That would also mean that we had to invest in the entire British AI stack—it must be British from start to finish. The second issue is supply. We need to make sure that we have the compute power we need and that we are not relying on US firms again for that.”
“With the activist Government in the US turning off technology and restricting its availability outside the US, that puts at risk not only our NHS but, most importantly, the defence of our realm against Russia, for which others may have more sympathy than we do. There is also a social cost, as people look at a company such as Palantir and say that it does not reflect their values. It is used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and by Israel to target Gaza. That has a huge impact on public trust. It is also bad for the UK economy and innovation, because it crowds out UK firms that could have those public contracts. That is just one example of a dependency that is putting us at risk both socially and economically. It does not have to be that way.”
“A maker exports its products, services and ideas around the world, as we did in world war two, but the UK is at risk of becoming an AI taker and simply handing over the keys to giant US tech firms that are buying up our best young AI companies. It is still our technology; it is just being bought up, packaged and sold back to us so that we become indebted. As we are talking about the impact on our economy and our society, I want to point to Palantir, which has the contract with the NHS. We know that UK companies could do exactly the same work, because I and many Members present have spoken to them. Even more concerning is that the Ministry of Defence now uses the company.”
“Britain is standing at another one of those moments, as we see with our economy and our military tech coming together and pushing forward either for the good of the nation or for its ultimate damage. The potential benefits of artificial intelligence are enormous, and not only for the private sector. AI is a tool that can pull our public services back from years of managed decline. The technology will allow us to detect diseases earlier and cut NHS waiting lists. It will free nurses and other public servants from back-office grind for work that only people can do. However, every country can see that prize, and the question that decides whether Britain leads or merely buys in is whether we make the technology or just import it.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey. I have rewritten my speech because I do not want to repeat all the things that have been said. I think we are in agreement, although we may have different perspectives. I want to take us back to 80 years ago, to a country house a few miles from Milton Keynes in my constituency. A handful of mathematicians built a machine that cracked the enigma code, and it gave birth to modern computing. That was Bletchley Park, where Britain proved that it could outthink the world. That inheritance still runs through Milton Keynes in the data centres rising on our edge, the British Standards Institution at Knowlhill—the oldest standards institute in the world, whose kitemark has told people that a product is safe since 1903—and a plethora of AI start-ups that outnumber Oxford or Cambridge.”
“Q5. The Deputy Prime Minister and most of us in the House have been victims of AI-generated fake news, also known as deepfakes. They mislead the public and disrupt our democracy. BBC news coverage and coverage from other news channels is also being AI manipulated to tell untruths. Will he, alongside MPs from across the House, support my amendments to the Representation of the People Bill, which would force anything that is AI created to be labelled as such, stop the production of deepfakes of ourselves and colleagues, and protect the UK from these destructive tactics, used by foreign states and others who wish to weaken our democracy?”
“I thank the Minister for her engagement with me on this issue. I want to praise both the work of the Electoral Commission in addressing the many threats that we face and the Rycroft review, which I had the pleasure of speaking to Philip Rycroft about. In the review, he focuses not just on money, which many Members have spoken about, but on the ongoing threats in the online world. Does the Minister agree that this is a once-in-a-generation moment to take a tough line on disinformation that is deliberately created in the UK and then amplified by foreign bots? Such disinformation has a bad influence on our right to choose based on real, true information.”
“The Secretary of State and I do not necessarily agree on the effectiveness of a ban, but we absolutely agree on companion chatbots. The entire business model of companion chatbots is to keep us and our children online for as long as possible, using grooming language, grooming behaviour and sometimes sexual circumstances to data-mine us and, more importantly, our children. Can the Secretary of State make it clear at the Dispatch Box that we will not tolerate these types of business models exploiting us and our children?”
“She brought a way of rebuilding our movement after that loss and a way of ensuring that women were at the heart of that. Not long after that, we both gave birth. I looked enormous, like a beached whale, and I gave birth to an 8 lb baby. Jo was tiny throughout, and she gave birth to a 10 lb baby—I do not know where she put that baby in her small little body, but oh my goodness! Still then, we were at meetings and we were determined to breastfeed at party conference, because, frankly, the thing that both our children had in common was that they were veracious eaters—”
“We cannot live like this. It is awful.” The solution, as is most often the case, was women. We hatched a plan on how we would revitalise Labour Women’s Network and ensure that Jo took over as chair. I then stood up out of my chair and, at three months’ pregnant, I already had an enormous bump. She said, “You’re pregnant! That is so exciting—so am I. How pregnant are you?” I said, “Three months. How pregnant are you?” She said, “Three months too.” You would not know it. She was this tiny little thing with a perfectly flat belly, and I thought, “That is three months’ pregnant, and I already look like this!” Our plan for Jo to take over as chair of LWN was very successful, and that success continues. What she was committed to bringing back to the Labour movement—what we organised and committed to—was hope.”
“It has been an absolute privilege to be in the House today and to listen to everybody’s personal reflections on Jo’s time here and on how they have been impacted. I want to talk about Jo as a friend of mine for years and years. We met in the Labour movement, and we kept finding ourselves in the same meetings—ones that focused on international development, but, most of all, meetings that focused on women. In fact, we became closest and bonded the most when we both became pregnant at the same time. Let me talk about the time when we were all processing having lost the 2010 election. Jo and I have always been people of action, and we have not been shy in coming forward; we both have that very much in common. I had started my own business, and she came barrelling into the office one day and said, “How are we going to organise?”
“I want to thank her sister and my friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater), for always letting us remember Jo with positivity, not anger, and with a gumption to go. That does not mean we are all going to do a run with my hon. Friend. [ Laughter. ] God knows what your parents fed you for breakfast, but whatever it was, it should be in those free breakfast clubs that we have across the country, because boy are you two amazing. You are supporting us to be the amazing MPs that we can be, and we are all supporting that next generation to say, “This is not what politics is about. This is not what our country is about.” We are better than this, because we are more united and we have more in common than that which divides us.”
“The dads have a beer club, but they are not as good at organising themselves. We still have joint birthday parties. We still go away at Whitsun recess to a Eurocamp somewhere. Her voice and her memory are never forgotten in those spaces. Inevitably, as we are sitting there as a bunch of mums drinking wine, her name comes up. Inevitably something triggers it—it could be about anything. She was a brilliant mum, and she did what all brilliant mums do, which is to try to be an example to their children and to be supportive of all the other mums. Faye, Tracey, Karin, Sarah, Hannah and Claire and others from our NCT group asked me to say this on their behalf: her passion brought people together, not just in the country, but as mums. Her sense of community and of cohesion that she expounded is why her death felt even more traumatic.”
“Diversity is what makes us the capital of innovation in this country. Diversity is something we celebrate throughout the summer, with festivals for diaspora communities, and everybody is included. We will be doing the MK Great Get Together. It is a picnic where everyone is invited. Bring a blanket; if you can bring food, bring food. If you have enough to bring food for others, bring food to share with others. Share the best cooking from your mum, share the best cooking that you know from your communities, and let us come together and celebrate our amazing city of Milton Keynes. I want to finish with the fact that I knew Jo best as a mum, and I want her to know that while her legacy lives on in so many places, it also lives on in our joint NCT groups that have come together. We continue to have girls’ nights out and girls’ weekends away.”
“I get criticised all the time for not having my surgeries in the middle of an Asda, and I keep saying, “I can’t. Yes, you need an appointment; you cannot just come in and see me. You cannot just walk into my office, because of my team”—who, again, are a bunch of amazing women. What does that say about our politics? We would all love to be more open and inclusive. We would all love to feel safe to pop up anywhere in our constituency, but we cannot. It goes against everything that Jo and I believed a good MP—a good public servant—should be, and I struggle with it all the time. I think Jo would love Milton Keynes, not just because we are quirky and weird, and she was a bit quirky and weird—we have new technology delivering groceries—but because we are a city that is not afraid to stand up and say that diversity is our strength.”
“The children ask, “Who’s this?” So you say, “Oh, it’s just a friend of mine.” “Do you know his name?” “No, but he’s a friend of mine, and he’s going to follow us around as we go to an event in the constituency together.” I think, “What would Jo think of where we are today?” We talked a lot about how women of all backgrounds needed to be in this place, because it was the only way we were going to make our politics better. That is something that so many of us have fought to achieve, yet we have brought women to this place and told them, “You need to put up with the crap we are putting up with”—apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker; that was not the best language. It is everything from social media to what we do to protect our children and the fact that we cannot be as open and available as we all want to be.”
“I do not know if anybody else is like this, but I have a series of amazing women in my life who have passed and with whom I have conversations, whether it is my grandmother, my mother-in-law or Jo. I think, “What would that conversation be? What would they say?” The conversation I have with Jo is, “How do you raise children and protect them when you are a Member of Parliament?” You try to laugh off your home security and your personal security; you make jokes about them. Sometimes you go to events with them, so you have this guy with these big guns—big muscles—walking along with you.”
“Can we come out and spend some time with you guys?” I very much understood that our job in that situation was to surround those two amazing children with joy, so we spent a lot of time driving around, singing musicals at the top of our lungs—it is a shared passion between our two families, and her children and my children knew all the words. We brought them to see the tree that the children had planted in Karura forest in memory of Jo. For those who do not know Karura forest, it is the forest that is right in the middle of Nairobi, and that tree stands there today. Now I am in Parliament. I sit on the Government Benches every day and, because of the strangeness of this place, we now look at Jo’s crest every day. She is a constant reminder.”
“The high commissioner in Kenya gave us his property for an evening, so the first thing we did was hold a reception event in remembrance and celebration of Jo, simultaneously with the one being held in London. There remains a book of remembrance at the high commission in Kenya of all the people whose lives she touched in Kenya across those many institutions, charities and other places, and some people who just knew about her but had been inspired to come. Not long after that, Brendan reached out to me and to other friends of his and Jo’s in Kenya, saying, “Look, it’s become too much for myself and the kids in the UK, and we can’t get a break because of all the media focus.”
“She’s doing an amazing job in the House of Commons.” I fell pregnant again when I was out there—Jo had already had her second child—and one day I got a phone call from a mutual friend of ours who was also in Kenya, and he asked me, “Have you heard the news?” I literally had to sit down because I thought, “I’m going to collapse, and this baby is going to get squished. I need to sit down and take this in.” I just could not believe it. Because so many people in Kenya knew that I had known Jo, I was inundated with messages saying, “What are we going to do?” None of them said, “Isn’t it so sad?” They said, “What are we going to do?” That is so Jo.”
“After that election, Jo won and became the MP for Batley and Spen, and I went off to Kenya, because I thought, as you do, “If I can’t make a difference here, I can go and make a difference elsewhere.” We had completely swapped paths: she had spent time in Kenya while I was a special adviser in the Labour Government, and now she was representing our views and ideals here and I had gone off to Kenya to see what I could do. Everywhere I went, people would say, “Oh, you’re from the UK—do you know Jo?” I would proudly say, “Of course I know Jo. She’s my friend.”
“Are we going to stand in this election?” We had asked everybody else to stand, because that is what we do, and finally we asked each other and said, “Look, I’ll do it if you do it,” because we were not confident. We were confident in other women; we could see all those qualities in other women, but we were not confident that we were the ones to take that forward. That is such a woman thing to do—we look at others and see all their amazing characteristics and abilities, but we struggle sometimes to see them in ourselves. We made a pledge to each other that we would stand in the 2015 election—she in Batley and Spen, and me in what was Milton Keynes North at the time. We would check in with each other regularly. We were each other’s secret lifeline, in this world in which we had encouraged other women to go where we had never been before.”
“As are mine, and they were only a few days apart. The other thing we did was bring together our two NCT groups and try to radicalise them to the Labour cause—some more successfully than others. We dragged them to LWN fundraisers. We ended up organising many women with their babies and their buggies coming on to the Terrace of the House of Commons. We were determined that these women who we had bonded with so much in our pregnancies—the time, and then the feeding, the burping and the sleepless nights—were going to become part of our revolution. We were both behind-the-scenes women; we liked to work and build up other people. But in the run-up to the 2015 election, we called each other back and forth, asking, “Are we going to do this?”
“I will raise with the Minister something that I have already raised with her in a letter about the impact of Anglian Water, another failing water company. There was no water on the hottest day of the year for families in Woburn Sands and the Brickhills. That is a disgrace. Around the same time, there was a lack of water pressure, and the fire and rescue service in Milton Keynes had to bring in water to fight a fire. Does the Minister agree that each and every one of these companies has a story of failure, and it is time we held them to account? I urge her to resist calls to allow failing water companies to determine how many homes can be built in this country. Instead, we should make them do the job that they are there for, which is to give water to each and every one of us.”
“471.] With the country totally fed up with politics, I find it refreshing to remember that we in this House have the ability to discuss with passion what most of the country would find very dull. For millions of women and girls today, social media is where they learn about things like menopause, endometriosis, polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, fibroids, vaginismus, dysmenorrhoea, bacterial vaginosis—are we all managing to control ourselves hearing these terms?—and countless other aspects of women’s health. If social media had been prevalent when I was desperately trying to figure out why my periods hurt more than giving birth, I am sure I would have been able to advocate for myself with my GP and receive my adenomyosis diagnosis far earlier than I did.”
“My team had a really interesting time searching Hansard for this debate. As they trawled through it, they found really interesting examples of “orgasm” being used, which I find quite entertaining. In 1978 the former Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch spoke passionately in favour of the creation of the Defence Select Committee, saying: “I am firmly convinced that to discuss defence in the House in the traditional way is merely to give everyone the chance of an emotional orgasm.” —[ Official Report , 3 April 1978; Vol. 947, c. 144.] In 1982 the former Member for Grimsby spoke against the horrors of what would happen if cable television became the norm, warning that “We shall finish up with wall-to-wall orgasm” and “constant pornography”. —[ Official Report , 2 December 1982; Vol. 33, c.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the matter of the censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I want to flag at the beginning of this debate that I will be using a selection of words that big tech deems too sexual for its platforms. I hope everyone in this room can hold their composure and not get too flustered when I mention “sexual” terms such as vaginal atrophy and pelvic prolapse. To reassure the Chair, the precedent has already been set in the House for most of these terms. “Vagina” was first used in the House in 1961; “labia minora” in 1983; “orgasm” in 1974; “clitoris” in 1971; and “vulva” goes all the way back to the 1880s. I must make a point about the historical use of the word “orgasm”.”
“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. He makes a really important point. It is so ingrained in us to go first to the internet to search for information. We have agreed ways to make sure health information is proper health information and that we are not getting bad science, but even when using the ticks that are supplied by various platforms, advice is still being shadow-banned. The online world is where women ask questions when they are often too embarrassed to ask elsewhere about period pain, discharge, lactation, or how to use a tampon safely.”
“They deserve medically accurate information without censorship. Ultimately, this debate is not only about algorithms. It is about power: who gets heard, who gets visibility, whose bodies are treated as acceptable and whose health is considered legitimate. Right now, the message that many women receive online is this: “Your body is inappropriate. Your anatomy is shameful. Your health is controversial.” It is also about autonomy. If we can make informed choices, we have autonomy, but until big tech changes course, women will continue to pay the price in lost education, lost opportunity, lost trust and, in some cases, lost lives. The technology companies have the money and they have the ability; what they lack is the will. It is about time they found it.”
“They must explain how their algorithms operate, why women’s health content is disproportionately targeted and how appeals are reviewed. Secondly, the Government must stop allowing this issue to fall between policy silos. This is simultaneously a health issue, a women’s equality issue, an online safety issue and a digital regulation issue. It requires co-ordinated action between departments, regulators and the affected organisations. Thirdly, platforms should work directly with clinicians, educators and trusted charities to establish verified pathways for evidence-based health content. Finally, we need a cultural shift. Women and girls deserve to talk openly about periods, menopause, infertility, miscarriage, sex, orgasms, puberty and breastfeeding and every other aspect of their health without shame.”
“I am coming to the end of my speech, but I want to mention that Essity surveyed about 4,000 adults and found that two thirds look online for health advice, while half rely on social media for health and wellbeing information. Among young people, that number is even higher. Overwhelmingly, the public reject this censorship. Nearly eight out of 10 adults said that words such as “vagina”, “period”, “boobs” and “menopause” should not be restricted when used educationally. The public understand what platforms apparently do not: women’s anatomy is not obscene, women’s health is not inappropriate and education is not pornography. So what must happen now? First, big tech companies must stop hiding behind opaque moderation systems.”
“The Government have now acknowledged that poor-quality online health information harms women’s outcomes—I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Dr Ahmed) for his work on that—particularly around reproductive health, contraception, miscarriage, menstruation, menopause and infertility. I am glad to see us acknowledging that, but tackling misinformation means nothing if accurate information is suppressed in the first place. If charities are hidden, educators are shadow-banned, doctors are down-ranked and medically approved content about the uterus, cervix, vulva and vagina is blurred, conspiracy theorists and grifters fill the vacuum and women suffer.”
“Think about the message that sends to young girls online: that medically accurate language about their own body is unacceptable and that they should hide behind euphemisms and embarrassment. This is not accidental. Words connected to women’s healthcare are treated as suspect content when they should be treated as healthcare education. That is the same prejudice that women have faced for centuries, simply translated into code. Victorian doctors dismissed women’s suffering as hysteria; today’s algorithms suppress the words that women search when they need to find out whether what is happening to their body is normal. The technology has changed, but the sexism has not. This censorship has consequences far beyond embarrassment or inconvenience. When trusted information is hidden, misinformation flourishes.”
“Tommy’s, the pregnancy and baby charity, had a video flagged as inappropriate because it included the word vagina. The video featured a researcher studying the vaginal microbiome to better understand infections linked to premature birth and miscarriage. Again, educational, evidence-based medical information was treated as inappropriate content. Ordinary women are seeing this happen every day. Influencer Charlotte Emily has more than 90,000 Instagram followers—something I think every politician in this room would like. She said that posts about periods, body image, menopause and women’s health perform dramatically worse than her fashion or lifestyle content. She said that simply using the word “period” instead of euphemisms like “Aunt Flo” reduces visibility.”
“Apparently, period products are considered inappropriate for under-18s despite the fact that the vast majority of girls begin menstruating well before that age. Sixty-four per cent. of women’s health businesses have lost revenue because of those restrictions. Some businesses report losses of half a million pounds a year. One company said their app downloads collapsed from 250 per week to just 50. Another said years of content creation vanished overnight. Smaller femtech start-ups are the hardest hit. Hanx, a women’s sexual wellness company, said nine out of 10 of its adverts were rejected in the early days, and even now 34% of all its adverts are rejected. Meanwhile, treatments for erectile dysfunction are explicitly permitted under Meta’s advertising rules; women’s libido products are not.”
“Education campaigns like those save lives, yet the algorithms of big tech treat them as indecent. While charities are struggling to share lifesaving information, women’s health businesses are also being throttled. The global femtech market is projected to exceed $97 billion by 2030. It should be one of the great growth sectors of the future; instead, female-led health businesses are facing relentless moderation barriers. Bodyform’s Vagina Uncensored campaign was censored 22 times in one month across Meta, TikTok, Instagram and X. One advert containing the words “menstrual cycle” and showing a sanitary towel with blood was rejected by Meta unless it carried an 18-plus warning. To remind people, periods start much younger than 18 years old and the questions start even earlier than that.”
“Because bystanders are often hesitant to touch women’s chests, remove bras, expose nipples or remove clothing in an emergency. Thames Valley Air Ambulance created an educational content video using a female CPR mannequin to demonstrate how to apply defibrillator pads correctly. Facebook removed the post and Instagram temporarily deleted it. The reason? The female mannequin breached community standards. Again, after appeal the content was restored with a blurred sensitivity warning. The charity responded: “If we can’t even share an image of an educational use manikin online without it being deemed ‘inappropriate’, how are we expected to normalise removing a real person’s bra to…save their life?” As you can imagine, similar content with a male mannequin is never removed or shadow-banned.”
“Penis, prostate, balls, breasts, ovaries, cervix and womb are not taboo, however vulva and vagina, the two rarest of the gynaecological cancers, are being censored and dismissed.” The Eve Appeal’s educational posts are designed to save lives. Hiding women’s anatomy behind “sensitive content” warnings does not protect women; it silences them. Such policies can even put lives at risk. My right hon. Friend the Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), who could not make it here today, has been raising awareness of another extraordinary case involving Thames Valley Air Ambulance. The charity launched a campaign highlighting that one in three women suffering cardiac arrest do not receive CPR before emergency crews arrive. Why?”
“The Eve Appeal has posted the same content three or four times over the last five years, but last month, Instagram removed the post for alleged “nudity or sexual activity”. The Eve Appeal’s account received a warning and its appeal was rejected. Eventually, the post was reinstated, but it was hidden under a “sensitive content” screen, warning users that the image “may be upsetting”. I have seen the image, and it is literally a line drawing. The Eve Appeal received no explanation, and the sensitive content warning has stifled engagement on its post. One of the Eve Appeal advocates, Zoe, told me, “When I was diagnosed with vulva cancer, I was clueless. Why? Because I was taught the whole thing was a vagina. The use of pictures with labels of anatomy and names would have been a great help.”
“This morning, I met representatives of the Eve Appeal, the UK’s leading gynaecological cancer charity, who handed me a letter that they wrote to Meta after attempts to reach it by other avenues failed. They told me that they are extremely concerned about the suppression of some of their content. Last month, The Eve Appeal shared a medically accurate illustration of vulval anatomy on Instagram. It was not pornography or explicit material, but a labelled, educational diagram intended to help people understand their vulva, recognise changes in their cervix and identify symptoms of vulval cancer. The post had a Patient Information Forum tick, the gold standard for health information content.”
“Then the warnings escalated, and Meta began to simply remove its posts. Examining Meta’s community guidelines allows us to understand why these organisations are so alarmed. Meta says that it allows nudity for “educational”, “medical” and “awareness-raising content”, but that is clearly not what is happening in practice. Under its policies relating to “adult sexual activity”, which it supposedly bans outright, Meta includes “menstruation” alongside “dismemberment”, “cannibalism” and “bestiality”. Something that every woman does monthly—an involuntary biological process connected to the menstrual cycle that is experienced by billions of women—is grouped alongside acts of violence and abuse. What does that tell women about their bodies and how they are being understood by these systems?”
“These takedowns began last October and have affected more than 50 organisations globally, some of which support tens of thousands of women. Repro Uncensored, a non-governmental organisation that tracks digital censorship focused on gender, health and justice, documented 210 instances of account removal and severe restriction this year, compared with 81 last year. That is not random moderation, it is escalation. The Sex Talk Arabic, a UK-based Arabic-language sexual health platform, says it receives warnings from Meta almost weekly. The organisation’s former director, Fatma Ibrahim, said that Meta repeatedly informed it that posts about sexuality, reproductive health and sex education would not be recommended to others because they supposedly violated the platform’s rules.”
““Shadow-banning” is the term for when users can still technically post but their visibility is secretly throttled. Their posts stop appearing in feeds, their reach collapses, their engagement disappears and their followers cannot find them. In the examples I have seen, the user is never clearly informed about it. That is censorship without accountability, which is harming education, charities and businesses, reinforcing stigma and, in some cases, putting women’s lives at risk. We need to call that what it is: algorithmic sexism. Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has removed or restricted dozens of accounts belonging to abortion providers, women’s health campaigners and reproductive health organisations across the world.”
“I completely agree with my hon. Friend. I met some survivors of vulval cancer this morning. Even though they included a former midwife, a health advocate and other people who were well-informed, they told me about their struggle they experienced when advocating for themselves and to be taken seriously by their GP. They knew something was wrong with their vulvas, but they could not get through to their GP. Luckily, they all did; they are all doing well and have responded to their cancer treatment, but they might have been able to advocate effectively sooner had they been able to access more information than they found online. There are more women out there in exactly the same situation. Words such as “tampon” are being suppressed by big tech platforms.”
“I imagine that many men were quite surprised, when they got married or entered a relationship, to find that it was not blue. And we certainly were not all out rollerblading. The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge, asked an important question: should Government dictate what platforms publish? He is right, and the OSA does not say that women’s health information cannot be published. Where I have a bit of an issue with his argument is that, although he is right that it is a commercial decision, it is also a commercial decision that allows the platforms to continue to push pornography, violent material and misogynistic material. If they want to make money off people in this country, we need to make sure they are not doing damage to this country.”
“That is why it does not do well.” Actually, they are creating content that is being deliberately suppressed. I appreciate what the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Alison Bennett), said about the difference between this and adult content, violent misogyny and racist language. All of that is allowed, yet these terms are not. It shows the power that these platforms have: they say that they cannot suppress these words, but they can. Terms like “rape” or horrible terms that are racist, antisemitic or anti-Islam could be in the same position as women’s health terms, yet they choose for them not to be. I loved her mention of blue liquid. We all remember the blue liquid, and we all remember being surprised, if we were told beforehand, when it was not blue liquid.”
“Police find it extremely frustrating, and it does not meet legal thresholds, when children say, “He touched my cookie,” or, “He touched my ginny.” They need the child to say the right word in order to proceed, and it is another angle in this debate that we must not forget. Using the correct medical terminology allows us to crack down on paedophiles and groomers. My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Samantha Niblett), whose embarrassment threshold is even lower than mine, which is hard, talked about important post-birth advice and how shadow-banning is particularly problematic because it is deniable. What it says to women, doctors, gynaecologists and femtech entrepreneurs is, “You are just creating content that is not interesting.”
“Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) talked about her children creating embarrassing situations, which I recognise, too. My daughter had a conversation with her friend at the school gates, alongside many other mums and school- children, about her favourite word. She declared, very proudly, that “vulva” was her favourite word. She had learned it at school as appropriate. She knew the difference and told me proudly that I must not misuse “vagina” for “vulva”. That raises an important point about child abuse, which is a little outside the scope of this debate, but not entirely, because we have to use the correct terms.”