How a critique of FC replaced a critique of ABA in a journal dedicated to free speech
The initial issue was this: Are autistic people more likely than others to get censored? Or, specifically, are autistic people particularly prone to getting banned from social media by automated, AI-based moderation?
Back in 2020 I was permanently suspended from Twitter, apparently via its AI-based moderation system, apparently for a tweet that, quoting a joke threat from a certain autistic relative of mine, used the word “smash your head.” My reason for posting that tweet and others like it was to contrast actually autistic communications, warts and all, with the bland autism advocacy statements and synesthetic poetry that are extracted from minimally verbal autistic individuals through one or another variety of facilitated communication. Think “I’m going to smash your head” vs. “I want to free my people” or “My senses fall in love.”
But I didn’t get very far in making this point because shortly after I posted the tweet, both it and my Twitter account were disappeared for violating Twitter’s Rules.
I later published a piece in Persuasion about my experience and its broader implications for free speech in public online forums (aka “virtual town squares”). A few months ago, that piece caught the attention of some editors at Index on Censorship, a nonprofit organization with a quarterly magazine whose aim is “to raise awareness about threats to free expression and the value of free speech as the first step to tackling censorship.”
The editors were preparing an issue with a special focus on speech rights in the neurodiversity world. Might a social media suspension triggered by an autistic person’s joke, they wondered, be part of a bigger censorship problem that disproportionately affects autistic people? Indeed, that was something I myself had started wondering about.
But my exchange with the editors took some unexpected turns and ultimately resulted not in an article about how autistic people are disproportionately vulnerable to being censored by AI, but instead in an article that not only critiqued FC, but took the place of an article that would have critiqued ABA instead.
Here’s a stripped-down version of what our email exchange looked like (most of this is paraphrased).
March, 2023
Them: We’re wondering if you think autistic people are more likely to get kicked off social media by AI than other people are? If so, would you be interested in writing an article about it?
Me: Yes and yes.
Them: Great. Please include statistics and specific anecdotes.
April, 2023
Me: I’ve been unable to find statistics or even anecdotes. But as an autism linguist I may be able to come up with some hypotheticals. Alternatively, it just occurred to me that there’s a much bigger free speech issue in autism called Facilitated Communication. I’d be happy to tell you more about that and then write an article about it instead.
Them: Your first idea sounds really interesting.
Them: We’re hoping you can get this to us in the next two weeks.
Me: [Here I quote myself verbatim].
Sorry for my delay. Your invitation to write an article on this topic has been an occasion for me to reflect on what I really know about it, and I am starting to doubt myself. The more I think about it, the less certain I am that autistic individuals are disproportionately susceptible to getting banned from social media. Autistic individuals tend to be more cautious about following rules, including rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a particular forum, and their communications tend to be more literal, and therefore less likely misinterpreted by AI-based moderation. While there are plenty of examples of autistic individuals being socially shamed and shunned and dismissed by those who don’t understand autism, I don’t think this generally rises to the level of out-and-out suppression of speech.
On the other hand, there really is a story to tell about out-and-out speech suppression in autism, and that's where Facilitated Communication is concerned. As I mentioned earlier, this is something I do know a lot about and could easily write a piece on. Here is a link video that makes the speech suppression issue in FC quite clear:
[I link to Janyce’s analysis of the “No More! No More!” video]
This clip, importantly, is from an award-winning movie, The Reason I Jump, which has been promoted around the world by multiple major news outlets. As the annotations here demonstrate, the young woman’s typing is being directed by a facilitator while her spoken words are being ignored. It is a terrible human rights violation that is crying out for media attention. If this topic is of interest to you, I would be happy to write about it.
Them: Thank you for your honesty. We will think over your alternative topic.
Me: Thank you for considering this alternative topic. I think it is a really important one.
Them: We’ll be in touch.
May, 2023
Me: [verbatim]
If Index on Censorship has the stomach for it, there's now one more reason to run an article on FC and communication rights: the journal Nature has just showcased two individuals who are subjected to FC and attributed statements to them that were extracted from them via FC.
[Here I link to the article]
Nature's article, and the credibility it lends to FC, is highly alarming to all of us who care about the communication rights of non-speaking individuals with autism, among the most vulnerable individuals on the planet.
Them: Apologies for the delay. We’ve actually commissioned a similar piece to the one you’re proposing. This piece is on Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA): how it’s effectively a form of conversion therapy and how some clinicians report finding it hard to speak out against it and propose alternatives. But the author has suddenly fallen ill and is unable to write it. Would you be interested in writing something along these lines? Given our pending deadline, we would need it by next Wednesday.
Me [verbatim]:
Thanks for your message. Here's a counteroffer. How about an article that makes the case that FC is far worse than ABA in terms of treatment, resemblance to conversion therapy, and the difficulty in speaking out against it and proposing alternatives--in addition to the complete lack of evidence and the complete suppression of communication rights? That’s an article I could easily produce by next Wednesday. And it's a very topical piece, as the pro-FC movie Spellers has just come out (I have a review of that coming out tomorrow).
Them: Thanks for your reply. We will think this over and get back to you right away.
Them: That sounds good and interesting. Can you still mention ABA and how it can be seen as controversial, even if there is a worse alternative?
Me: That sounds fine to me.
Indeed, it did. I have no qualms about writing that ABA is controversial—because it is, at least where autism is concerned. As I wrote in my piece, it’s been criticized both for “falling far short of early claims of ‘curing’ autism and for attempting to inflict such a cure.”
Of course, the focus of my piece is facilitated communication, including recent variants like Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) and Spelling to Communicate (S2C), and why these amount to censorship. Among other things, I explain how “speech, particularly speech made in protest, is silenced or ignored, while alternative messages, including messages that negate those protests, are forced out and falsely attributed.”
The article is currently open access—you can read it here.
