Citizen Better

[upbeat music] Does online activism actually work?

If the first thing you thought of are those black squares people posted on Instagram in 2020, you might be a little skeptical that social media posts really have the power to create change, and you wouldn't be alone.

A 2023 Pew research study showed that 46% of social media users took some kind of political action last year.

However, 76% of users believe that social media makes people think they're making a difference when they really aren't.

But what if I told you that social media activism can work if you do it right?

I'm KJ Kearney, and this is "Citizen Better."

To figure out how to do online activism that makes change for the better, I talked to disability justice activist Keah Brown.

From her first viral hashtag #DisabledAndCute, that encourage self-love and joy among disabled Twitter users.

Keah's used her platform to advocate for better disability representation in pop culture.

I have cerebral palsy, and so growing up I didn't really have a lot of people who were like me in my area.

And so a lot of the work that I had to do to discover who I am and discover other pe ople like me was built online.

And that's when I became an activist online because I had no groups in person or in my area, and I really began to do my work so that I could make sure that people didn't have to worry about not seeing somebody who looked like them and not having a voice like theirs in these conversations.

For Keah, social media activism wasn't about performance, it was about access.

Anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone can log on and talk about what's important to them.

A lot of disabled people come to the internet for community because disability can be so isolating.

There's so much that we can't do, not because we don't want to, but just because our body has limitations.

Like, I can't walk long distances or run a marathon, but I can get online and use my voice to hopefully make the world a better place.

When offline spaces are not inclusive, disability justice advocates have been able to create new online spaces to interact and organize around their shared experiences and goals.

Like when activists Alice Wong, An drew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan created the social media campaign, #CripTheVote that became a rallying point for disabled activists to call for inclusion in candidates' policy priorities.

Disabled advocates have often used social media to call attention to the ableism they face in everyday life.

Take Jon Hetherington, who was unexpectedly turned away from a flight because of his wheelchair, which he had traveled with many times before.

They tell me that my chair is apparently four inches too tall to be loaded onto the plane.

Guess I'm not going to Seattle and I'm not seeing Beyonce.

The man goes, "Oh, I think I remember your chair.

We had to write a report about it."

And that's the first time ever that I've ever heard this.

I've flown all over the country from Oregon to as far as Texas to go to different concerts and never heard anything like that.

(KJ) Now, I understand that this would be frustrating under any circumstances, that getting these tickets was a very hard thing to do, trying to go see Beyonce.

Really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and you had to miss it.

So just give us a little bit of detail about what you decided to do after that.

You know, I was just frustrated, so I decided I'm just gonna make a TikTok and kind of talk about the experience, what I had gone through, just thinking that, you know, I didn't have very many followers on TikTok.

And I just thought a couple hundred people would see it, and that would kind of be the end of it.

I was just wanted to share my experience.

So that's what I did.

(KJ) Yeah, you did a great job because people were tagging who?

Tell me some of the people that were being tagged in your video.

Beyonce, Jay-Z, Beyonce's sister Solange, her mom, Tina, her entertainment company, just anyone basically that had any close connection to Beyonce was getting tagged in this TikTok basically.

I didn't even know that it had gone viral on other platforms at that point.

So anyone who says social media doesn't actually make a positive difference has never met the "Beyhive."

I mean, what other groups of tens of thousands would be committed to going completely silent?

[silence] [loud cheering] From the K-pop stands organizing streaming parties to get their favorite groups to the top of the charts, to the TV lovers rallying to get their favorite shows renewed for another season, fandoms know how to set a goal and stay on it.

And in that way, fandom is a lot like activism.

I'm very pop-culture obsessed.

I am a firm believer that we are our best selves when we can join in on something that we all enjoy.

And I feel like a lot of activism is just trying to get people to understand where you're coming from and joining you in the fight for equity and inclusion and joy.

If you've ever used closed captions on Netflix or rolled a wheelchair, stroller, a suitcase through the curb cuts in the sidewalk, you've seen the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a set of civil rights protections prohibiting discrimination based on disability.

But do y'all realize that the ADA has only been in place since 1990?

In fact, disability justice activists fought for decades for this legislation.

In the spring of 1990, after decades of sit-ins, transit boycotts, and protests modeled after the Civil Rights movement actions of the 1960s, disability activists like Mike Auberger and Maria Palacios ga thered for Wheels for Justice March on Washington.

When they arrived at the base of the Capitol steps, they wanted to show just how inaccessible many physical spaces are and how lack of access robs disabled people of dignity and equality.

Hundreds of activists, including the 8-year-old Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, got out of their chairs and crawled up the marble stairs making a powerful statement that legislation couldn't wait any longer.

(Jennifer) I'll take all night if I have to!

(bystander) All right!

(KJ) The ADA was passed later that year requiring businesses, schools, and transportation services to accommodate disabled people.

But in practice, it isn't perfect.

Like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it outlaws discrimination, but doesn't mean discrimination never happens.

Many businesses and institutions have been slow to adopt the accommodations.

The ADA is not the end all be all.

It is the start; the ADA being signed into law was signed into law in 1990, which is the year before I was born.

But it's just the start, it's just a paper.

Oftentimes when disabled people encounter inaccessibility, it is on us to do the work of trying to make it accessible.

Businesses can take years to actually make the building accessible.

If a disabled person has the time, attention, and money to keep after them to make a building accessible-- it is on the disabled person to bring accessibility to the forefront when it shouldn't be.

And that's exactly what happened to Jon when he got turned away from his flight.

(Jon) And he ultimately tells me, "Well, "the only plane big enough to get you to Seattle is an Airbus," and it's gonna get me into Seattle about 12 hours after the concert is over.

And I'm just demoralized at that point because like it was a very hard process to even get a ticket to Renaissance Tour.

This was a huge deal, one of the biggest tours in the world.

Fortunately, making noise is something activists and fandoms using social media know how to do.

When the "Beyhive" helped his video go viral, he was able to get another flight and get tickets to another date of the Renaissance tour, but John didn't experience a fl uke moment of discrimination.

In fact, during the social media flurry around his video, Jon declined to name the airline that he was turned away from to make it clear that wheelchair users encounter problems with airlines all the time.

In 2022, more than 11,000 wheelchairs were damaged by flight crews, more than one out of every 100 wheelchairs they handled.

He wanted me to know that his experience was not an individual issue, and that online activists should keep putting pressure on airlines to ensure better treatment of all wheelchair users.

It's not just about one guy getting to go to a concert and see one artist.

This is about systemic issues that people live with on a daily basis, you know?

My going to this concert, while amazing, did not defeat ableism in any way.

It's still something that I deal with every day of my life, and there are millions of other people who do too.

So that's been my goal in all of this, is to keep raising those issues and not let people just have this be a feel good moment.

It's not that really; it's far more than that.

Social media campaigns like Jon's and Keah's show that online activism can make the impact that last longer than the time it takes for us to scroll to the next post.

But in order to beat the "Slacktivism" allegations, we have to ensure that one moment of virality is not the end of the conversation.

To me, the most important thing is that people understand that they can be affected by these issues as well, whether they're currently disabled or not.

And it's important that we all engage in these issues.

And you need to be able to lend your privilege and your platform to the people who know what they're talking about.

I feel like for as disabled people, we're often talked at not to, and so you need to talk to the people in the community in which you consider yourself an ally and make sure that you are building a world that allows other people outside of your community and your lived experience to speak on there so that you can grow together, that you can make a world that's more accessible and more kind and more gracious and more honest.

I feel like we live in a world right now that sort of thinks of self when really community is what's gonna make us a better people as a whole.

[upbeat music] Social media can be a great starting point to learn about all kinds of causes and people we might not otherwise get a chance to hear from.

But as the activist who fought for the ADA teaches us, the struggle for greater accessibility took decades, not days, and it's still going on today.

Luckily, when we look beyond the likes and shares, social media gives us an opportunity to build community that can last for the long haul.

My name is KJ Kearney, and thank you for watching "Citizen Better."

[upbeat music] Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.