The Rise of Influencer Activism: How Disabled Influencers Use Social Media to Advocate for Social Change

Since the mid-2000s, social media platforms have helped amplify the voices of marginalised communities, providing new avenues for social change advocacy while simultaneously challenging our understanding of collective action. Although each platform presents both opportunities and constraints for activism, one area of significant change has been the emergence of new voices through the reshaping of the boundaries between promotional work, public opinion leadership, and advocacy.

Among these new voices is that of disabled social media influencers, who have the potential to be distinctive agents of social transformation, challenging traditional narratives surrounding disability, raising awareness about the challenges faced by disabled individuals, and fostering a sense of community around these issues that may support social and political activation.

Using discourse and visual analysis of Instagram content from ten disabled travel influencers over a six-month period in 2023, along with in-depth interviews with fifteen prominent disabled influencers, this study investigates to what extent and how they engage with disability rights issues and related collective action. Through the lens of the situational theory of publics, this study explores influencers’ self-representations, interactions with dominant narratives, the balance between market-oriented and advocacy-driven themes in their content, their interactions with online followers, as well as their relationship with platform affordances and online dynamics.

The findings demonstrate a strong focus on disability-related content and advocacy themes, which are generally kept distinct from commercial content. These influencers tend to frame advocacy from a personal perspective, generally eschewing direct calls to action. Unlike traditional grievance-focused activism, their content offers a more nuanced, individual-oriented approach that subtly challenges prevailing stereotypes by projecting positive realities. However, this study also identifies limitations in their impact as their efforts lack direct connections to broader collective mobilization, and explores the reasons behind this issue.