“Good morning, Twitter! What are you doing today to support the voice of people with #disability?”: disability and digital organizing

ABSTRACT

Understanding Twitter by individuals and organizations to raise awareness and give voice to the disability community provides important insight into digital discourse around disability. This study examines #disability tweets shared during National Disability Employment Awareness Month in October 2018. Sourced and cleaned, English language tweets (n = 12,963) were analyzed through a mixed-methods approach. As the title of this paper, a tweet from our dataset, suggests, Twitter discourse reflects disability activism and culture as it exists globally. This work highlights important methodological considerations for differentiating the ways individuals and organizations utilize Twitter and highlights the importance of qualitative analysis in this regard.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitter
• disability
• hashtags
• digital organizing
• qualitative analysis

Acknowledgments

This work was completed when Forber-Pratt was a faculty member at Vanderbilt University. We would like to thank all past and current members of Dr. Forber-Pratt’s research lab who contributed to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The authors use identity-first language of “disabled people” where appropriate versus person-first language of “individuals with disabilities”. Exceptions of this are if referring to specific legislation or how an author being cited used terms. This reflects shifts in language use, led by the members of the disability culture who prefer to refer to themselves as disabled. The American Psychological Association (2019) states that identity-first language can be used interchangeably with person-first language.