Content note: mentions of ableism, online harassment, and discrimination.
The TikTok Blind Challenge began as a trend where users pretended to be blind. People stumbling around their homes, posting videos for laughs, or claiming to “try being blind for a day.” Under hashtags like #BlindChallenge and #BlindKidChallenge, thousands of people joined in, mimicking vision loss for entertainment and clicks.
For Jane, who lives with vision loss, those videos were traumatising.
“That trend was horrific,” she says. “Every now and then – especially working in policy – I would feel like we had made inroads and then things like that just take it backwards.”
“If it’s getting virality, if people are watching, why are they entertained? Why are they not appalled by that? I just find that disturbing. I’ve had to do a lot of work myself to be thick-skinned enough to go, ‘Okay, I’m going to advocate no matter what.’ But I am worried about trolling.”
The trend, she explains, didn’t just mock blindness, it reinforced ableist stereotypes and violence.
“It is a repetition of a stereotype about disability, that is violence. It really is reinforcement of ableist attitudes and assumptions about disability. They are doing what they presume is someone’s life with disability, which is often not correct. In that challenge, it was about laughing about it and mocking it.”
The difference between pretending and living it
For Jane, vision loss isn’t content. It’s her every day.
“It’s my everyday experience. I don’t get to turn off my vision loss. It’s with me all the time. My life is hard because of it,” she says. “There’s challenges like crossing the road, stepping over the gap onto the train, worrying about when I go for a job interview and whether I’m going to be immediately excluded because I’m walking with a cane.”
“The experience being perpetuated in those videos is a few minutes of pretending. But for someone like me, that’s a reality we can never switch off. We can never not worry about our environment. We can never not worry about keeping ourselves safe both in the physical environment and now in an online one too.”
Advocating in unsafe spaces
As both a woman with disability and an advocate, Jane continues to speak out online, but it comes with constant fear.
“As somebody with a disability who is also an advocate online, when you go in online spaces to advocate, you’re then compounded with more violence. I have a greater risk of it and therefore fear of it. I still do it anyway, but every time I hit publish, I am always worried about it turning and coming my way.”
She’s seen how online anonymity emboldens cruelty.
“It emboldens people to be able to feel like they can say more. Because if they’re behind a screen, especially if they’re behind a false name, they can say whatever they want and not feel any repercussion.”
Even when she posts educational or advocacy content, the system works against her.
“The algorithm doesn’t particularly like advocacy. I know that from watching my own analytics. Sometimes things are too important, but I get really annoyed when it suppresses something like domestic violence and the intersectional impact for women with disability.”
When discrimination feels normal
Jane’s experience isn’t unique, and that’s part of the problem.
“Online spaces are more violent for women, without question,” she says. “I think discrimination against women and people with disabilities has been normalised.”
And those attitudes bleed into real life.
“The effect is that it minimalises the capability of someone with disability,” she explains. “Just because my eyes or ears don’t work as well as other people’s doesn’t mean that I don’t have the capacity for work and participation in my community like everyone else.”
Until that changes, she says, people with disability, and especially women, will continue to be underestimated and excluded.
A call for accountability
If Jane could speak directly to the people behind the platforms that host these trends, her message would be simple: do better.
“I really would like people to know that these trends harm, and if they wouldn’t be comfortable being the topic of a viral trend like this themselves then why do they think it’s okay for someone else?”
This 16 Days of Activism, Jane’s story is a reminder that behind these kinds of viral trends lies real harm and that platforms have a responsibility to act.
Mocking disability is not content. It’s cruelty.
The next time a hashtag takes off, platforms must ask: Who is being hurt?
