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There is a real shift happening on social media toward transparency. People are naming burnout, trauma, disability, grief… things that used to stay hidden. That matters. Visibility matters. But there’s a line most platforms never tell you about: authenticity is only welcomed as long as it remains comfortable for the viewer.
The moment honesty turns raw, whether by posting an unfiltered meltdown or when frustration spills instead of being captioned with a lesson, people recoil. They unfollow. They mute. They decide it’s “too much.” Not because it isn’t real, but because it disrupts the illusion they were sold: that suffering should be educational, inspiring, or neatly resolved by the end of the reel.
Autism especially gets filtered through this demand. Social media doesn’t reward reality; it rewards legibility. It wants autism to be recognizable, repeatable, and aesthetically consistent. Something you can understand in under a minute, something that reassures you that you “get it.” And so autism gets sanded down into traits, quirks, and lists in order to be digestible and palatable in an effort to garner the largest audience. Yet, what good is a large audience if the content they are being fed reinforces the exact stereotypes and inequities that autistic people face on a daily basis? The uncomfortable truth: there is nothing good about it.
Real autism isn’t linear. It isn’t always articulate or endearing. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s grief. Sometimes it’s a grown adult breaking down because the world refuses to meet them halfway for the thousandth time. That kind of truth doesn’t convert well. It doesn’t fit brand partnerships. And it makes people deeply uncomfortable, even when insulated from experiencing it in the real world, because it forces them to confront inequity instead of applauding resilience.
So we end up with a distortion: visibility without honesty. Advocacy without risk. A culture where being “relatable” matters more than being accurate, and where autistic people who don’t conform to the palatable version are quietly pushed to the margins, even by our own community.
This is where the harm compounds. When autism is flattened for virality, we don’t just misinform outsiders; we teach them how to dismiss us. We give them a version of autism that asks nothing of them. No accountability. No systemic change. No reckoning with the fact that society itself is often the source of our distress.
And then, when someone shows the unfiltered cost of living in an inequitable world, when the mask slips, when the pain is visible, they’re told they’re hurting the movement. That they’re too angry, too negative, too much. As if justice was ever built by people who stayed pleasant.
A movement obsessed with optics will always sacrifice its most honest voices.
What we have right now isn’t cohesion; it’s performance layered on top of fragmentation. We police language harder than we challenge systems. We prioritize being correct over being constructive. We burn bridges with people who are trying, albeit clumsily and imperfectly, to understand, while institutions that actually hold power remain largely untouched.
If autism advocacy becomes indistinguishable from influencer culture, where branding outranks building and engagement replaces impact, we lose the very thing we’re supposed to be protecting: our full humanity. Not the curated parts. Not the inspirational parts. The inconvenient, painful, contradictory, deeply human parts.
Those are not liabilities. They are the truth, and the truth of a marginalized community will never be consumable.
