Not safe for health?: the impacts of platform policy and regulation on Australian digital HIV outreach

This article presents findings from a para-ethnographic research/practice partnership with the National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA). Community-led public health organisations such as NAPWHA practice both public and counterpublic health promotion. They seek to work with and advocate for their constituent communities, while also seeking to work against public discourses stigmatising sex, drug use, sex work, and HIV. However, social media platforms increasingly suppress health promotion content as ‘sexual solicitation’, ‘misinformation’, or inappropriately ‘political’. At the same time, NAPWHA member organisations’ social media accounts are increasingly targeted by trolling and abuse framed as ‘freedom of speech’. Findings reveal the challenges of engaging people living with HIV (PLHIV) within the fragmented publics of contemporary digital health communication. Findings highlight the existential threats that social media platform policy and governance pose both to the political subjectivity of communities affected by HIV, and to public health promotion and outreach more broadly.