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Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms' increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists' performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees' various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees' strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning how to perform an identity in social media is a complex, two-stage process: lifelong environmental learning through socialization and acculturation mediated by selfcomparison to others, and the transformation of this learned information into personal knowledge about how to develop one's identity online. However, disability performance complicates this learning process through oppressive able-bodied medicalization, especially of concealable communicative disabilities. Based on 31 in-depth interviews with autistics, stutterers, and hard-of-hearing users, and 7 social media documentation diaries, this article provides a comprehensive perspective that presents dis/ability performances as a product of powerful learning aspects that involve both disability-related and "ablebodied" dimensions of learning. Although individuals learn how to deal with social media violence regardless of their disabilities, social, cultural, and technical learning of how to be a disabled person in the world dramatically influences dis/ability performances and perpetuates the complexity of performing a disabled self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increased technical accessibility of social media, disabled users' attempts to be socially included are still understudied. These users' agency-based choices are impacted by constant able-bodied surveillance and disciplining, especially when it comes to dis/ability visibility and potential context collapse. This paper develops the concept of disability performance within social media studies, presenting a qualitative study of social media users with concealable communicative disabilities: autistics, hard-of-hearing and people who stutter. Four factors were found to shape users' dis/ability performances: the use of social media interfaces for the compartmentalization of disabled identity; users' continuous efforts to make their social environment inclusionary; the centrality of users' disabled identity and intersectionality; and the design of the performance's message. Together, these show disability performances to be deliberate expressions of agency on the part of vulnerable social media users, who perform dis/ability according to their own evaluation of authenticity to increase their social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]