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.
Autism disinformation on Telegram soars in Latin America and Caribbean.
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Tea@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
boonhet@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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.
LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
… 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.
Konstant@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Any good groups in Telegram?
dbtng@eviltoast.org 2 weeks ago
Got some nice word clouds in that article.
radiation from 5G networks, vaccines, reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, consumption of Doritos, and even chemtrails.
spiritual healing and attempts to discourage medical treatment, reinforcing the guilt of parents and caregivers.
anti-vaccine discourse, ‘the new world order,’ scientific denialism, and anti-institutional ideology.
networks are organized, create meaning, fuel distrust, and capitalize on collective anguish
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Can we just teach classes in ALL schools everywhere about rather things like this, what it is, what the cause is, and yeah, that telegram is full of shit
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Amir@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Clunky UI? TG has been my favourite Android app for over a decade, it has amazing UI, not sure what you’re talking about…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I honestly think this is fine, hence why I use Signal. But the rest are not, hence why I use Signal.