Considering the author of the Forbes post is Emily Willingham, who has a history of writing about Autistic advocacy issues, I'd say you need to slow your roll on this one, Shadow. The original group she wrote about was called, "Families Against Autistic Shooters." Your overreaction is to the counter group that was set up in response to the original page.
Before it was taken down, I saw the Facebook group in question. It was highly offensive. I bet Emily didn't post pictures of the page because it would need a heavy Trigger Warning for Autistics. Also, why give that heinous voice any ounce of respectability by showing it, even in screencap form?
In one of her comment replies, Willingham added:
Emily Willingham wrote:
I gave a great deal of consideration to posting this article. I did not link to the page itself for a reason. I came down on the side of writing about the page for two reasons. (1) It has been shared to hundreds and hundreds of people and a petition to have it taken down has thousands of signatures. So that cat is out of the bag, the troll bait has been taken. (2) As I noted in the article, yes, of course, that’s what people with limited intrinsic resources want, a lot of reactive, negative attention, but … this site is exactly the sort of tone for some people to take seriously–and I know from experience following Newtown that they will–which has serious, real-life repercussions for autistic people, whether we feed the trolls or not. This person will do what they want. It’s a little late to worry about the “autism-violence” connection taking root in the public mind.
But the onus is on Facebook to moderate it appropriately, rationally, and swiftly, in this instance and in future instances, and that’s the ultimate message of this post. You can irrationally mock the idea of autistic people as a stigmatized, marginalized group if you like and be angry about “neurodiverse cult movements,” but the fact remains that autism is considered a disability under federal law, and Facebook would do well to take note of that.
I, for one, am glad that it's been taken down. It clearly violated the Facebook community standards for hate speech. Heck, it had Autism Kills in its URL.
The only thing that can be seen as "clickbait" or "trolling" here would be a hastily concocted thread based upon a sliver of information available to the reader.
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The Autistic Pickle is typed in front of a live studio audience.
No ghosts were harmed in the making of this post.
06 Oct 2015, 6:39 am
