Welcome!
On this page, you will be able to read first-hand accounts of social media written by autistic adults.
If you are an autistic adult and would like to share your experiences with a wider audience, get in touch with us here.
David
My use of Twitter is tied to what some people may call my special interest, and that is taking actions, such as sending emails and signing petitions, relating to animal welfare, the environment and people.
castlering
There’s a concept of oversharing that us autistics are apparently renowned for; we have a reputation for not just talking about something, but going to the nth degree, regardless of whether or not the listener is interested. What is interesting though is how so many NTs* do just that on Facebook.
Flo
Growing up, I’d always compared myself to my friends. As a child, I was painfully aware of the differences between myself and my classmates – socially, I struggled to make friends, but academically I was performing well above my age group. I preferred reading about archaeology in a quiet corner of the classroom instead of…
Helen
I am 38. I find technology overwhelming and there’s a limit to what I would keep, and what I would like to never have been invented. I didn’t grow up with friends around me to gradually learn about and adopt advances in technology and I didn’t anticipate it’d become so central to everything in life.
Anonymous
So, I had this huge long article planned and drafted. Word salad, all of it really as it’s pretty simple. I came to Twitter looking for information at the beginning of the pandemic, having a husband who we thought was “vulnerable”. Having almost lost him in January 2018 to a combination of flu, pneumonia and…
Jack
If there is a common pattern to be found among most, if not all, social media profiles it is one persona that emerges: we are all PR managers. For a large section, this kind of depiction is deeply distasteful – perhaps even a slur. Regardless of the platform though, it is hard to overlook how…
Perspectives from workshop participants
In this blogpost series, we have been writing about our participatory design workshops. The purpose of these workshops was reinventing social media in collaboration with autistic adults. As we explained in the first entry of the series, participatory design argues that all of us have the right to take part in the technology-making process.…
More testimonies from workshop participants
This blogpost has been kindly contributed to the participatory design series by one of the workshop participants. Over the last few months I have had the exciting the opportunity to be part of an autistic driven workshop in relation to our understandings of social media and the ways in which we interact in such online…
Autistic Adults Online 