Breaking through barriers and shadowbans: How disabled influ-activists navigate algorithmic challenges

Despite disability’s centrality to digital inclusion debates, scholarship on disabled influencers remains limited, focusing primarily on representation rather than material advocacy conditions. This study examines how disabled influencers navigate platform constraints while pursuing digital advocacy, extending Van Dijk’s access framework to content creation contexts through semi-structured interviews with sixteen Italian content creators on Instagram and TikTok. Digital inclusion emerges not as linear progression but as ongoing negotiation with systematically biased technological and commercial systems. Findings reveal sophisticated adaptive strategies including “algorithmic advocacy literacy” and “experiential pedagogy” that transform lived experience into educational resources. However, these operate within structural constraints including “systematic advocacy suppression” through shadowbanning, automated content removal, and monetization restrictions. The study introduces “accessibility maintenance work,” invisible, uncompensated labour creators perform to make platforms genuinely accessible, while revealing economic stratification where resource availability directly correlates with advocacy capacity. Results challenge approaches privileging technological solutions over systematic reform, demonstrating how platform governance constrains advocacy through accumulated algorithmic bias and automated moderation lacking contextual understanding.