This has been stewing in my mind for a bit. I’ve written and rewritten and taken notes on this kinda thing multiple times but I think the best way to keep the scope in check is to just keep it simple, and the focus narrow. This is going to get a bit…disjoint and rambly, and I’m sorry if it is. This is just one of those things I can’t really stop thinking about, and seeing friends and friends of friends constantly feel the same way I do is just…wearing on me.
It feels like there’s a changing of the guard happening with social media, as former big platforms (Twitter, Facebook) begin to squeeze ever so harder or are taken over by right-wing dipshits and then ran into the ground. This has caused other social networks to bloom in their wake (though admittedly both the ones I talk about here began before Elon tanked Twitter, which was the primary motivator for everyone to get out and find a better microblogging service). Mastodon and Bluesky are the frontrunners. The former being started way before Twitter started getting super bad, and the latter actually being an in-house Twitter project before being spun out some time ago to become its own autonomous thing.
This is not a piece to pit Bluesky and Mastodon against each other1Though to be fair, Bluesky has been infinitely more welcoming than Mastodon, at least at first.. Rather, it’s me talking about how some of us just…feel like we have no place at this new table that’s being built.
But who are you? What experience do you have?
I figure this will come up, so let’s address it now: I’m very very politically left leaning, so don’t mistake my words for being that of a right-wing influence. I’m disabled in multiple ways, both physically (T1 diabetic) and mentally (Asperger’s2I know Asperger’s is named after someone who is a Nazi Eugenicist, and it’s sort of “out of vogue” to use that term. However, as of late I’ve been getting tired of feeling like my condition (and others, too) keeps getting swept under the rug with the term “high function autism spectrum disorder”. In my experience, 9 times out of 10 whenever I use HF ASD to describe my condition it just confuses people and they come away no more understanding of me than when they began. Saying “Asperger’s” seems to click better and people seem to immediately understand what that is, unfortunate name aside. I am in no way defending some guy who’s a Nazi. They’re all bad and deserve to get punched in the face. But for better or worse…”Asperger’s” seems to do a way better job at making people understand what I have to deal with./potentially undiagnosed ADHD). I have had people advocate for me, both in a beneficial way, and in a damaging way. The damaging, bad kind of advocacy is going to get a lot of focus in this piece, and I want to communicate clearly that I do speak with some experience, here. Advocacy is great, but not when you do so at the cost of the people you’re advocating for.
In the interest of full disclosure, I will say that I’ve personally not had any of the aforementioned stuff happen to me, potentially because I am very proactive about blocking, and when I see friends on New Social Media getting accosted by “advocates”, I will block those people so they cannot interact with me. But as what I just said implies, friends and people I know have been on the wrong end of this.
Now I also realize that T1 diabetes–while it is very much a disability–it doesn’t really affect any of my primary senses. Not yet, anyway. I still have my sight, my hearing, and my mobility. While this is by no means conclusive and I’m sure there are differing opinions, I did quickly ask a friend in a group chat who is missing one of their primary senses (in this case, hearing) and asked what he had to say about the things I talk about later (toxic disability advocacy). He wasn’t too supportive of the aggressive advocacy, but again: This is just one person’s opinion out of many. Some might appreciate it to some extent.
Right, let’s get on with this.
The Hostile, Vocal Minority
One could say this was also a problem on Twitter and other platforms: You have this vocal minority of users whose job it is to just make the platform an all around shitty experience for its users. This has been a thing since time immemorial; forum trolls have been a thing for decades, for example. The thing that changed with Mastodon and Bluesky is that not only do you have the shitty troll users (with their rogue instances whose mission is to go after other instances that haven’t yet blocked them), but you have this sect of users who will relentlessly come for you under the guise of disability advocacy, and those are the people that make my blood boil more than anything. Trolls are whatever, they’re just there to watch the world burn.
But as a disabled person myself, someone attacking someone else in the name of advocacy on my behalf? Maybe I’m wrong, but I am not okay with that, if only because doing that is more likely to just piss people off and rather than adjusting their habits to support disabled people, they’re just going to exclude them out of spite.
On Mastodon and Bluesky, I’ve seen this come in multiple flavors. One of the big ones is alt text, or the text you put as a description to a photo to help people get an idea for what it is they’re looking at. The other one is content warnings. They share a common element, though: The people white knighting these things generally do so with hostility, and assume malicious intent. If you don’t alt text, well, it isn’t the fact that your brain sucks because of your disability, you just hate blind people! Begone, scum!3There is, however, an excellent proposed middle ground for this: Allow readers to contribute their own alt text (and the author can approve it). This takes the pressure off the author to describe the photo, and allows the disability advocates to put their money where their mouth is and actually do something to help out. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Content warnings are slightly different: They serve to–as the name implies–warn the person clicking on the content what lies beneath the proverbial facade. The problem with content warnings in the earlier days of Mastodon were numerous: They were insanely overused so it felt like they lost a lot of their value, and because at the time Mastodon’s clients didn’t have a means to auto-expand content warnings, this created a horrible user experience. Especially in long threads. Further, the culture around content warnings became toxic in and of themselves: You were expected to know the triggers of the people who might just see your post, and CW it appropriately. Something as simple as someone making eye contact in a photo? That’s a trigger, needs to be behind a CW. Don’t agree? Well, screw you, you must hate neurodiverse people!
It didn’t take long to feel like there was some resemblance of overreach: Talking about racism? Yeah, we don’t want to hear it. Put it under a CW so we can ignore it. Making a post that might be considered annoying? Please CW it. If you called this out as being ever so slightly asinine? You’d piss off the vocal minority and they’d call you out for hating disabled people.
I think this personally came to a head for me when I first jumped onto an instance and was called out for advocating against the overuse of CWs, and that person’s personal profile having a post that said something along the lines of “My mental health is worsening because there’s not enough CWs”. This also arguably started this whole post stewing in my head for a looooong time. For what it’s worth, I don’t think CWs are in an of themselves a bad thing. They’re great for things like spoilers, for example! But I feel like that sect of users pushing for the overuse of them (and subsequently, pushing for BIPOC to censor themselves behind CWs) absolutely killed the point of them (and instead garnered animosity toward them).
(There’s also the point to be made that past a certain point, you need to curate and filter what you want to see. You can’t expect everyone to automatically know your triggers and icks and adjust to you when they haven’t met you let alone interacted with you. Imposing your will on people like that isn’t right.)
The thing is, with things like Twitter and Facebook, I can for the most part log on, let some harmless shitpost fly, and be done with it. The people who like it will find it, the people who won’t will avoid it, zero expectations all around. Mastodon, at least back then? It felt like I was logging on to be handed the reins to someone’s mental health, and I had to walk on eggshells to post anything lest I upset someone completely unintentionally.
If you read this and thought “well, what’s the problem? Just post, it’ll be fine!” Congrats. You might be neurotypical. Or able to mask real good.
But to someone who’s neurodiverse, especially someone with Asperger’s? This whole thing is a minefield and it feels like the only winning move is not to play. It feels like that sect of us doesn’t have a place at the new dinner table, anymore.
Forget to alt text, or struggle to describe things for alt text? Fuck you, get out, there’s no place here for someone who brazenly hates blind people.
Using content warnings the wrong way? Fuck you, get out, I can’t believe you didn’t think of little Johnny over there who gets triggered looking at pictures of anatomically incorrect pufferfish.
It’s never “Hey, maybe I should think about the person posting this, maybe they have some disabilities of their own that prevent them from doing something I have no trouble with!”
It’s always “Fuck that scum, they must hate people because they won’t bend over backwards for someone they have no idea is even reading their content.”
Someone I follow on Bluesky equated this to randomly accosting someone sweeping their house’s driveway and asking them why they hate wheelchair users because they don’t have a wheelchair ramp on their house, without stopping to consider why that might be. (Maybe a rental? Maybe cost prohibitive? So on and so forth, but you get the idea.)
Or, another example I thought of: You could be conversing with a group of friends at a convention and someone butts in to your conversation only to say that you all are terrible people because you’re not speaking in sign language so a potentially deaf person in attendance can hear what you’re saying.
To talk about my own experiences, my brain is just screwed in such a way that sometimes I struggle to find the right words to use for alt text. Because keep in mind you’re being asked to in essence paint a picture in a blind person’s mind to accurately describe the photo. There have been times where I’ve tried to alt text and I just stare there because I don’t know how to describe the nature of an image. Multiple times? I just close the window and don’t post, because it’s too much friction. That’s the way my Asperger’s/ADHD-riddled brain works. If something presents too much friction or makes me overthink, I’m prone to just drop the whole thing instead.
That’s what I miss about Twitter, if anything: There was no expectation. Just be a decent human being (don’t be a racist/phobic ass) and post what you want and your people will find you, and the people who can’t stand you will avoid you. It was frictionless. I wasn’t being asked to stop and consider every possible scenario in which someone could read my post. Arguably, this is why a LOT of people like me went to Mastodon, saw what it was, and beat a very quick retreat to Twitter even though it’s being actively run into the ground by Space Karen.
But on the new wave social media, it feels like you need to predict who’s going to read your post, and bend over backwards to accommodate anyone who might see it, lest you anger the vocal minority. As I said before: For neurotypicals this might be easy, but for some of the neurodiverse, this stuff is hard, and I wish these white knights/advocates could comprehend that.
I think a post I saw flash by my feed on Mastodon really sums all this up: It went something like “We shouldn’t screw over people with one disability to benefit people with another.”
I also implore you: If you’re one of these “advocates”, and you don’t actually have these disabilities/know someone who does, as someone who has had normal people advocate for me in a toxic way: Please look in the mirror, and ask yourself if the work you’re doing is actually helping the people you claim to advocate for, or if all you’re doing with your tactics is pissing people off. Talk with people who actually have the disability you’re advocating for. See what they have to say. See if they think your tactics are helping their cause.
Lastly, a point I wanted to make down here in the footnotes that I didn’t get a chance to really cover in the post: At least as far as Mastodon it really didn’t help that a lot of us jumping over from Twitter were being made to feel like we were intruders invading a space we weren’t welcome to. There were more than a couple posts saying that this is Mastodon’s Eternal September and kvetching about the unwashed masses flooding in from Twitter because they’re going to steamroll over the existing culture. I don’t know about you, but whenever I feel this sentiment, my brain screams “it’s time to leave, we’re not welcome here, and I don’t want to push my luck.”
- 1Though to be fair, Bluesky has been infinitely more welcoming than Mastodon, at least at first.
- 2I know Asperger’s is named after someone who is a Nazi Eugenicist, and it’s sort of “out of vogue” to use that term. However, as of late I’ve been getting tired of feeling like my condition (and others, too) keeps getting swept under the rug with the term “high function autism spectrum disorder”. In my experience, 9 times out of 10 whenever I use HF ASD to describe my condition it just confuses people and they come away no more understanding of me than when they began. Saying “Asperger’s” seems to click better and people seem to immediately understand what that is, unfortunate name aside. I am in no way defending some guy who’s a Nazi. They’re all bad and deserve to get punched in the face. But for better or worse…”Asperger’s” seems to do a way better job at making people understand what I have to deal with.
- 3There is, however, an excellent proposed middle ground for this: Allow readers to contribute their own alt text (and the author can approve it). This takes the pressure off the author to describe the photo, and allows the disability advocates to put their money where their mouth is and actually do something to help out. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.