Another New Front in the Disability Wars

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s bizarre handling of Twitter, formerly a reasonably respected outlet for minority voices, took a weird turn this week. Musk’s argument with an Icelandic product designer revealed not only internal business practices whereby contracted employees have no idea whether they’re still employed, but a top-level willingness to mock the disabled. It also further exposes the moral rot inherent in America’s—and by extension the world’s—economy.

When Elmo bought Twitter last autumn, I speculated aloud that he’d moderate his increasingly weird opinions. Not because he’d change his mind (his formerly center-left views have drifted into fascist-adjacent territory over the last three years), but because he’d learn quickly that advertisers wouldn’t pay him if their product appeared beside commercially unpalatable content. Outright bigotry hurts your bottom line anymore. Just ask “Papa” John Schnatter.

Rather than learning, however, Elmo’s most recent Twitter spat reveals how money insulates executives from consequences. Since the buyout, Twitter’s workforce has fallen by over two-thirds, including the entire staff responsible for finding and purging bigoted content. As a result, “hate speech,” defined as language targeting blanket groups for aggregated disparagement or threat, surged five-fold in just the first twelve hours. Anecdotally, the incidence of bigoted language remains worse than that.

I realize some readers may consider this a non-issue. If the bird site collapses, why not let it? Nobody particularly mourned when MySpace collapsed under similar mismanagement. But I’d contend it seriously matters, because Twitter provides an important venue nobody else is offering. As journalist Sarah Kendzior writes, Twitter provides a platform where minorities, LGBT+, and the disabled have the same chance as anyone else to be heard.

Product designer Halli Thorleifsson represents probably the least-heard among those categories. While antiracist voices and pro-LGBT+ voices remain active, and have entire months dedicated to resisting their diminishment, the disabled have remarkably few allies. Even those who, like me, have personal stakes in disability rights advocacy sometimes forget the groups with whom we’re nominally allied, because their voices get lost in the brouhaha.

Halli Thorleifsson

Though not disabled myself, life circumstances and personal relationships have taught me recently how widespread ableism is in America’s economy. Our society openly disparages anybody who cannot shape their lives around a forty-hour work week. The fact that Elmo initially answered Halli Thorleifsson’s inquiries with a laugh emoji, and refused to believe that anybody with diminished physical capacity could work for him, is only a highly visible example.

According to government statistics, disabled Americans are twice as likely to be unemployed as the general public. I can’t find statistics on underemployed disabled Americans, that is, Americans working below their training or mental capacity simply because they can’t perform heavy labor. As I learned during my teaching days, people who struggle with diminished physical abilities, but aren’t paraplegic or otherwise stereotypically disabled, often aren’t counted as disabled at all.

That’s why it matters that Thorleifsson got a fair hearing through Twitter. The platform gave him an opportunity to draw public attention to his maltreatment—something few other disabled workers often receive. Halli Thorleifsson proves the lie behind the argument that “nobody wants to work anymore.” He’s living proof that, given the opportunity, most people prefer productivity and usefulness. But a dollar-value economy won’t grant them that.

The implications go beyond one social media platform. Historically, small-F fascists targeted disabled people before racial or ethnic minorities. Not just in Germany or Italy either, but here in America: the SCOTUS decision in Buck v. Bell, which permits the involuntary sterilization of the disabled, has never been formally overturned. Even the Former President (mostly) knew to use coded language in disparaging minorities, but evidently considered the disabled fair game.

Elmo’s distrust of public mockery isn’t entirely unjustified. He probably remembers, more acutely than us civilians, the public furor surrounding the Ligma/Johnson hoax and other similar fake callouts last October. I can’t entirely blame him for meeting an open-sourced accusation with initial distrust. But the fact that he didn’t have somebody present to remind him not to answer a developing disability rights argument with a laugh emoji is disheartening.

If Elmo succeeds in his ongoing campaign to constrict the bird site and silence dissenting voices, disabled workers like Thorleifsson will have even fewer channels for distributing their word. And, let’s be honest, that constriction seems likely. Elmo is exceedingly thin-skinned when criticized, and is unlikely to permit such public criticisms to happen again. It seems a question of when, not if, he’ll close another door for disabled workers’ rights.