This research explores the findings on the social media engagement and advocacy activities of 52 women’s health NGOs from across the world during the year of 2019, amid an environment of hostility and attacks of far-right groups against women’s rights, and particularly in areas such as women’s sexuality and female bodies. These findings are only a small part of a larger four year study, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), which examined the advocacy communication activities of NGOs working on women’s health in the US, Europe, Latin America, Brazil and India.

Questions included how NGOs’ communication strategies reflect on their communication activities, and how they combine offline and online media to advocate on SRHR. The research made use of a mixed methods approach which included in depth interviews with 50 CEOs from the organizations as well as a short survey applied to the communication directors of these NGOs, including from Care International UK to Anis Brazil. This was combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA) of their institutional websites, as well as their social media engagement on social network platforms. This paper focuses on the CDA results of the social media engagement of the organizations conducted during the months of March and April 2019, when a total of 1.505 tweets were collected. Findings show an emphasis on ‘hard fact’s, including NGO journalism devices such as ‘fact checking’, however with a growth in use of more human interest stories, particularly making use of storytelling, to reach out to larger audiences.

Abortion is a common and safe medical procedure with a long history of practice within the U.S. Yet, inaccurate and misleading information around abortion persists, including falsehoods about the accessibility and legality of abortion related healthcare, myths around long-term physical and mental impacts, and misleading descriptions of abortion procedures (Sanz-Suarez-Lledo & Álvarez Gálvez, 2021; Patev & Hood, 2021; Sharevski et al., 2023). The prevalence of inaccuracies has been exacerbated by the patchwork of state laws governing access to abortion in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) in May 2022 (Harris, 2022; Rice et. Al, 2022). Despite extensive documentation of abortion-related misinformation in online and offline spaces (Bryant & Levi, 2021; Sharevski et al., 2023), and calls of concern from healthcare practitioners about such content (Thomas, 2022), little academic research exists documenting and examining how misleading abortion information impacts the everyday work of healthcare providers and others working within abortion healthcare. Accordingly, this research project looks to address these current gaps to properly document the impacts of misleading information on reproductive healthcare providers.

This study investigates how sexuality experts communicate sexual advice on online platforms and how audiences interact with and perceive these experts. Through a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics inherent in this communication process, we seek to gain insights into the evolving landscape of sexual advice and health in the digital age. Furthermore, our objective is to address a notable gap in this body of literature by incorporating how audiences engage with this content. We conducted a thematic analysis of TikTok videos and comment sections, combined with in-depth interviews with sexuality experts, to explore how experts build credibility amongst their audience, and how audiences engage with their content and evaluate expertise and credibility. Preliminary results suggest that creators employ various strategies when their expertise is questioned, including responding to comments, crafting replies to videos, and utilizing humor to connect with users. Audience members also play a vital role in validating creators' expertise. We also found that sexual health advice was not solely coming from creators, but also from those engaging in comments, fostering a culture of advice related to the video’s theme, challenging the conventional top-down hierarchy in sexual education where expertise is unilaterally shared. Ultimately, our study aligns with this year’s conference theme – examining the emergence and continuation of industries like sexual health education – highlighting the dynamics that arise within online spaces.

The Indian state’s move towards the digitalisation of the health sector has serious implications for how health care is availed and experienced by the people, especially the poor. When biometric identity systems are established for authorisation and verification, people are forced to meet the demands of technical systems for accessing healthcare. What kinds of relations are formed through these biometric-based information assemblages? What are the materialities of patient data and experiences within these information assemblages? How health data is organised, accessed, and controlled within the territorialities of the digital? This paper will look into the rise of datafication of health information and the making of biometric-based Unique Health Identification Number (UHID) in India with the case of the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) and the subsequent Ayushman Bharat Health Account (ABHA). The ABHA number is a 14-digit identifier distinguishing individuals within India's digital healthcare system. It is a unique identity linked to Aadhaar, facilitating enrolment in Personal Health Records (PHR), and the public insurance scheme -Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY). With a case study of the South Indian states of Kerala and Puducherry, the paper investigates the norms of governmentalities in datafication by looking into the requirements and conditions of enrolment into the databases for accessing healthcare. The paper looks at datafication as a technique for population management and problematises how enrolment into health identity systems becomes a condition for citizens' rights to access healthcare.