disinformation on Telegram soars
Honestly, you could probably leave it at that, because Telegram seems filled with disinformation no matter where you are.
This seriously sucks, though. It’s hard enough having people not understand autism, but to have this weaponized disinformation sucks worse.
Everybody agrees that disinformation is present in the relatively unregulated parts of the Internet and in crowds, but it would be hard to make people agree what is disinformation, outside of places like this with clear alignment.
Note how much fewer people agree that mass media are full of disinformation, that would be because mass media are man-made tools which give each their own kind of disinformation, a personalized poison. Same with social media.
My point was that where I live a significant part of population, including doctors, would consider the scientific idea of autism disinformation, and their own caveman bullshit not. This is similar to many other subjects and layers of existence.
So let’s please think for a moment before just blaming Telegram, the parts to hate about it are its clunky UI, lack of proper E2EE encryption, misguiding advertising, need for a phone number and a protocol which seems an untrackable mess (compared to better ones, not to what I can devise, of course), judging by alternative usable clients being too few.
They could have also left the media out. I’m sure misinformation is spread through all messenger apps.
its not just telegram. i see misinformation all over the internet now. autism is “trending”. so you see memes, posts, jokes, articles that have very little actual information that can be discerned.
Sad, disturbing and sadly not surprising. I‘ve heard the same is happening on TikTok for a while and probably many other corners of the internet. Just as we gain a better understanding of the matter, some bad actors have to ruin it for everyone.
Idk if it’s still going on but at least at some point, in some corner of the Tok, mental disorders were like little honor badges you could collect. People always showing off their stimming and whatever.
The worst one was always multiple personality disorder though. People referring to themselves as systems, having 100s of alters and getting new ones every now and then.
It sucks because it diminishes the realness of different disorders in people’s heads.
… do you know how isolating it is being a neurodivergent person who stims? Do you know how many times I’ve had people awkwardly look at me or ask me to stop fidgeting with a pen or whatever, which paradoxically made me more overwhelmed and more want to stim? I’ve literally done it my entire life, and I never once even knew that it was a symptom of adhd. People just told me I was annoying. I had no retort to that. All I could was try my hardest to hyperanalyze everything I did.
Seeing people stimming on TikTok genuinely made me feel less isolated. No one doing so was doing it as a badge of honor. It’s cause stimming is an activity that is so shamed across society it is miserable. For many of us it becomes a cycle of shame and frustration trying to control it. It’s even worse if you have a tendency to vocal stim. I got in so much shit at school when I was a kid for just blurting something out when I felt overwhelmed or overstimulated. I had no idea there were other people out there struggling with the same things. I had no idea other people couldn’t help but fold a piece of paper when it was handed to them or click a pen so incessantly that it started to actually hurt their hands.
The people accusing others of stimming as some kind of social credit were always just shaming people for stimming. That’s all it ever is. FakeDisorderCringe is a bullying subreddit dedicated entirely to shaming neurodivergent people and people with physical or mental disabilities. It’s just a bunch of people pointing at them and baseless speculating on whether or not someone else is suffering from something from their entirely uninformed perspective. You can’t tell if someone is neurodivergent from a video. They don’t gain anything from publicly identifying as such. It actually results in them being bullied and facing intense scrutiny.
Sorry, you probably did not intend this as a big statement it is just exhausting running into this opinion everywhere I look. It’s always women who are “doing it for attention” and you look in the comments and it’s just hundreds of people shaming them for stimming. Usually a few comments about how she doesn’t “look neurodivergent”. Especially if the person in question doesn’t have an official diagnosis yet, ignoring all of the biases and hurdles society places in front of people trying to get diagnosed.
You expressed this very well. Fighting ableism irl is such a huge, daunting task, especially when fully masked. Know you’re not alone.
I feel for you and I believe you when you say it helps you to see you‘re not alone. However there has been done a lot of observing by journalists and experts and it is largely agreed upon that the majority of information about autism on TikTok is sadly made up or heavily misrepresented.
Seeing other stim may be relieving but it doesn‘t change the fact that it‘s a platform where attention is the currency, virtually no fact checking is done and new, disturbing trends make the rounds all the time as a result.
Please be open minded about it. Because even if what you‘re seeing on there may be emotionally true for you, it‘s often played up or made up for attention.
The TikTok algorithm is also extremely aggressive in that it adapts very quickly to your preferences and creates closed environments. It is possible it simply doesn‘t show you any of those problematic posts. Whenever there‘s a critical article about the app, there are always users defending the platform and their users who genuinely think there is no issue because they can‘t see any of it in their feed. The way you respond to certain topics is completely different to how the average user responds and the algorithm picks up those differences very efficiently. I am sure most users have no idea what the site looks like on average.
No, it isn’t often made up for attention. And the kind of attention directed towards neurodivergent people on social media is overwhelmingly negative. The exception tends to be from other neurodivergent people.
I am neurodivergent. My partner is neurodivergent. The majority of my friends are also neurodivergent. I am aware of what misinformation about neurodivergent people looks like, and it is categorically not coming from neurodivergent people on TikTok. It is coming from communities dedicated to questioning the diagnosis of others. It is coming from neurotypicals who feel the need to gatekeep neurodivergent people and shame them for being neurodivergent.
Not having an official diagnosis doesn’t mean that you aren’t neurodivergent. Ive been diagnosed since I was 4, but I had far fewer barriers to getting that diagnosis than many people do. Particularly, women and girls face gigantic barriers all the time to getting diagnosed.
No expert or journalist can assess whether someone has a disorder over a video. That’s just a statement of fact. Only through performing actual tests and routinely speaking directly with and observing a patient in a controlled setting can you determine if someone meets the criteria for a diagnosis.
This phenomenon of accusing neurodivergent women and nonbinary people of faking it for attention exists in every social media, not just TikTok. TikTok is just the most prominent due largely to its accessibility. Making a TikTok is far less involved than making a YouTube video. It is in many respects easy for average people to create content for.
Ive seen the “problematic posts”. It’s always a conventionally attractive woman or a nonbinary person showing themselves stimming or having a meltdown or talking about any of the ways that being neurodivergent impacts them. The comments questioning them are always all about “xyz isn’t neurodivergent that’s just normal” “they probably make up a new diagnosis to go with every gender” “I’m neurodivergent and I am inferior in every way and want to die, there’s no way anyone could ever be proud of being neurodivergent, this happy woman offends me by trying to say that she is neurodivergent too”. It’s not scientific, it’s not journalism, it’s not medical. It is shaming people for being themselves. That’s all.
It’s not your business to gatekeep someone else’s neurodivergent status. It’s not your business to determine whether someone else’s symptoms are valid or not. It’s just ableism. That’s all it is.
Now I’m curious how do the journalists get the data to speak authoritatively, does tiktok give them special access or smth
They investigate reports from users and talk to experts usually.
Do you make videos like “look I have a cool new stim” or record repeatedly hitting people only to claim it’s a stim when they react?
If not, you’re probably not the target of my statement re: stims
Why would it be a problem for me to make a video saying “look I have a cool new stim”? Is stimming only permissible if I suffer socially for it? Is it a problem to celebrate stimming itself as something positive and good that helps me regulate my anxiety? I didn’t even know those little pop-it toys existed until like a year ago. I would never have known without TikTok and I now use them all the time.
As for the hitting people, I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’ve never even heard of that accusation before, and it’s certainly not what people mean when they talk about people “pretending to have adhd/autism for attention”. I’ve been in these communities before I know who they’re accusing of faking it. It’s largely women who are conventionally attractive who “dont look autistic at all” and non-binary people who “are crazy and make stuff up all the time for attention”.
