Integrate sexual cultures into social media!

• Platform design and regulation can shape our sexual imagination, possibilities, and health. When online spaces are sexually sanitised, segregated and gentrified, public discourse on sex, gender and sexuality is impoverished.

• Social media platforms have a positive duty and responsibility to integrate sexual media alongside other content to normalise and destigmatise sex and open up critical conversations between users.

• Making diverse bodies, genders, sexualities, and practices visible is affirming and validating for users, especially those from marginalised communities. Diverse sexual content can contest and disrupt harmful sexual scripts and binary representations.

• Sex education, health promotion, community-building and harm reduction material, including material on sexual health, pleasure, abortion, justice and safety, is often life-saving for individuals and communities. Sexual conversations on social media can be a constructive addition to, or substitute for, lacking sex education. Pleasure is a pivotal part of sex education and does not need to be sanitised.

• Censoring, banning, demoting, reducing and deplatforming sex is not an appropriate option. Sexual content can be integrated into platforms alongside other content without causing harm (for example, by giving users agency to choose to access or avoid it).

• Platforms have a responsibility to draw from a long history of sex-positive thinking to inform their community standards, terms of service, decision-making and automated tools.

• Platforms can prioritise and value sexually marginalised communities and build spaces in which users have equitable access to diverse sexual content, information and resources that are open-minded, non-judgmental and centred in consent.