Disability takes center stage on TikTok
[ad_1]
“Does Elodie [Costa] measures six iPhones? » This video, published in October 2021, has been viewed 19 million times on TikTok and has made 41-year-old Elodie Costa, from Nice, one of the French-speaking icons of the short video platform. Today, 850,000 people look at its contentwhich are divided between music – she participated in “The Voice” –, vlogs and jokes about her physique. “I have a lot of self-mockery, people asked lots of slightly bizarre questions, I wanted to answer them. It was quite spontaneous. she assures.
Romain, he launched on the Chinese platform in 2020, “like many people” thanks to the confinement. In barely a year, whoever calls himself ” Roroleheavy already had 900,000 subscribers. Today, 1.4 million people follow her stories, which often quip about her disability and wheelchair accessibility issues. The 36-year-old firefighter immediately launched into dark humor, in part to anticipate insulting or mocking comments:
“When you start self-winnowing, some will try to make jokes but it’s often the same, it goes around in circles. They quickly realize that it does not reach me. »
French Arthur Baucheronsuffering from spinal muscular atrophy which obliges her to move around in a wheelchair, the American twins Carmen and Lupitaconnected by the trunk, or the Turk Talha Yigit Batdalsuffering from Treacher-Collins syndrome, a malformation that affects his face… Like Elodie Costa, many of them have a disability and attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers on TikTok, where the hashtag #handicap has already generated more than 1.6 billion views.
“There was no model”
The presence on the Internet of people with disabilities is obviously nothing new. Across the Atlantic in particular, several personalities have emerged in recent years, such as the Canadian Ricky Berwick. Suffering from Beals Syndrome, a rare disease that makes his body limbs disproportionate, he started broadcasting sketches on the Internet from 2006. Today, he has 3.4 million subscribers on YouTube and more than 13 million on TikTok.
In France, we can cite ElsaMakeUp, active on YouTube since 2010. At first distilling make-up advice, she has now turned to lifestyle. During the early years of her career, the 31-year-old hid her motor disability from her followers, she explains:
“I didn’t want to change people’s perception, that people take pity on me, ask me too many questions, forget about beauty advice and only talk to me about disability. »
However, faced with insistent questions about the fact that the handles of her chair could be seen, and when she had to be away for several weeks for an operation, she finally decided to tell her story: that of a young woman paraplegic at 14 following an operation to treat her scoliosis. Elsa then feels relieved of a weight: “I was able to share more things about my moments of life, my daily life in a wheelchair. I could show the highs the lows. Finally, people were really benevolent. »
However, Elsa feels a bit alone in this emerging world of influence on the Internet, where almost no one seems to be disabled. “I discovered an English woman some time later, but apart from her, until a few years ago, there was no one who looked like me”, she regrets. A view shared by Romain who, when he became a quadriplegic following a skiing accident in 2011, only found small scattered videos on the Internet explaining a few techniques, but nothing very followed about life in a wheelchair. “There was no model. I said to myself that it was necessary to democratize all that, to show the way to say that the handicap, it is not the end of the world. »
A discovery-oriented algorithm
The situation seems to have changed with the arrival of TikTok. The accounts of people with disabilities have a visibility there that they do not have on other platforms, favored by the page entitled “For you” and its algorithm geared towards discovery. “Sometimes all it takes is one video that’s extremely popular, and it’s going to bring you a stream of new subscribers., says Roman. Where, on Instagram or YouTube, you have to be looked for. » The 30-year-old is also active on these two social networks, but he is far from having the same number of subscribers as on TikTok.
The fact that this social network is mainly used by younger generations also plays a role. “There is a view of disability that has changed in recent years, especially among young peopleexplains Stéphane Lenoir, coordinator of the Collectif handicaps, which brings together fifty-two associations representing people with disabilities. This is explained by the fight of associations, collectives, activists, but also by the fact that many young disabled people go to “classic” schools. There is a very strong desire for recognition, to participate in everyone’s activities, not just on the networks. There is no longer this injunction to hide. »
We also observe that many of these personalities are known more for their talents than for the details they provide on their way of living with their disability. Talha Yigit Batdal, for example, only posts dance videos on her account followed by 900,000 people. As for the American djbrownsugarvborn with the syndrome otofacio-cervicalwhich robs him of jawbone, he basically splits his videos between DJing sessions and sketches.
This exposure on TikTok was not won in advance. In 2019, the Chinese social network was pinned for having taken the decision to hide the accounts of people considered disabled, homosexual or overweight. At the time, the moderation teams justified this measure by saying they wanted to protect these people “likely to be harassed or cyber-harassed because of their physical or mental state”.
The company later admitted that this approach “was bad” and affirmed its intention to have an anti-harassment strategy “more nuanced”. Without having found an ideal solution, as Elodie Costa testifies: “There is still hate on TikTok. Personally, I am a victim of cyberbullying. But it’s beyond me now. »
[ad_2]
Source link
