Identity and Discourse Among #ActuallyAutistic Twitter Users With Motor Differences

Despite a growing awareness of the prevalence motor differences in autistic community, their functional impact is poorly understood. Social media offers ideal setting to observe this discourse less-contrived than lab-based structured interviews. The aims present study were (a) determine proportion Twitter users who self-identify as and dyspraxic/having developmental coordination disorder, relative alone, (b) identify common themes emerging from two moderated chat threads with motor-related prompts. Using research application programming interface, we harvested data users’ public profiles tweets containing terms related autism disorder within 1-month time period. We also #AutChat skills, which included 151 31 unique (two co-occurring disorder). Of these tweets, 44 explicitly about differences, while remainder consisted discussion topics more loosely associated skills. following quantified: manual dexterity, lower extremity, oral motor, gross posture, balance, stimming, movement pain, coordination. Together, findings indicate that are highly recognized discussed among individuals but not overtly integrated into identities at same rate.