ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the recent history and practices of promoting sexual health through social media. Public health professionals increasingly seek to reach target populations through social media. As digital ethnographers argue, new media participation is intertwined with young people's practices, learning, and identity formation. For young people, sex and relationship information is enmeshed with media and friendship practices. Unlike those for young people, online HIV-prevention strategies for men who have sex with men (MSM) precede and inform the current social media interventions for this population. A key problem with sexual health promoters using social media is their instrumental approach to these spaces. Practices of meeting and hooking up through social media do not simply replicate offline practices, but broaden social repertoires of sex and intimacy. Social media practices and platforms not only communicate something about a user's identity, but can also contribute to the ways in which social and sexual identities are produced through one's digital networks.