If your social media algorithm mainly consists of breaking news stories, book reviews, and cute dog videos, then chances are, like me, you probably use TikTok for its intended purpose: to unwind and catch up on pop culture after a long day. Thus, you’ve probably never encountered the term “acoustic” in a video or comment on the app before. My first exposure to it was from a TikTok my friend sent me, wherein I stumbled upon the word in the comment section. To my horror, I found that the term is the newest attempt to reincorporate and normalize discrimination against people with autism in modern inclusive society—and it’s working.
The term “acoustic” first appeared a couple of years ago, predominantly showing up in the comment sections of autistic social media creators’ pages. It is the intentional misspelling of autistic, originally for comedic purposes, that users now employ to avoid getting banned on social media when posting offensive comments. More recently, young people have started using it online and in everyday conversation, stripping it from its initial intention as an inside joke shared solely by autistic people. Through its prominence on social media, the term has since taken on a harmful, hidden meaning, contributing to a rise in ableism among young social media users, and the lack of pushback is arguably just as ableist.
According to autistic social media influencer Eleanor Flegg, the use of “acoustic” was initially an inside joke among the autism community, serving as a way to avoid unwarranted attention from bullies. Through social media, it quickly reached people outside of the community, who have since transformed it from a funny play on words used by autistic people to an insult used to bully and demean them.
In this context, an entry from the Urban Dictionary states that “acoustic” now refers to the “intentional mispronunciation of ‘autistic,’ and is frequently used in response to actions deemed ‘ridiculously stupid or ignorant’ by the commenter.” While the negative impacts of using this term should be evident to many, few people are talking about them. Those who are speaking up, like Flegg, already belong to the autism community.
“Once again, autism is then being used as the punchline to a joke and as an offensive thing and something that people should be ashamed of, which is completely incorrect,” said Zoe Willow—an autistic TikToker with 10.6K followers—in a post from August 2024.
This cruel trend doesn’t stop there. Social media users have created other terms to insult and mock people with mental health conditions and disabilities. People go as far as making terms that essentially call others offensive slurs, such as “restarted”—an intentional mispronunciation of the “r-slur” often directed toward people with autism.
But what is seemingly a chronically online wordplay has negative effects on the autistic social media users who read these comments. A YouTuber who goes by the username I’m Autistic, Now What? explained in a February 2024 video that these comments have led multiple of her autistic friends, and herself—who once took pride and relief in their diagnosis—to consider abandoning their medical label. Some want to hide this aspect of their identity, as they see it being used synonymously with slurs and linked to negative societal perceptions.
While it is extremely worrisome to see the normalization of TikTok’s youth openly calling people with disabilities slurs, the complacency of non-disabled people is as unsurprising as it is frustrating, and reveals their own ableism.
For decades, misinformation has fueled the stigma surrounding autism, with early studies laying the groundwork for harmful misconceptions. Ole Ivar Lovaas, a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist renowned for his research on autistic children and for developing applied behavior analysis—a type of behavioral therapy—referred to the autistic subjects in his studies as “primitive psychotic children.”
This trend of misinformation continues with discredited researcher Andrew Wakefield, who, according to an NPR article, claimed in 1998 that “there was a link between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, also known as the MMR vaccine.” Even now, though these findings have been repeatedly disproven, United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims vaccines have caused the “autism epidemic,” using his political power to spread anti-vaccine rhetoric. Last week, President Trump held a press conference dedicated to similar claims, where he strongly discouraged pregnant women from using Tylenol, suggesting it leads to a “very increased risk of autism.”
When young users not only see people on their phones tout hateful rhetoric about autism, but also observe political leaders and celebrities ridiculing it like a disease to be avoided, stigmatization becomes normalized as an acceptable form of cruelty.
Moreover, according to The Guardian reporter Justin Kirkland, “The R-word is in a new era of prominence in rightwing, chronically online circles,” with many of Trump’s supporters, like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Joe Rogan, using the slur with “gleeful relish to belittle and mock ideological enemies.” According to Dr. Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist, these individuals are drawn to the slur for “its taboo nature” and use it in a “‘please see me’ way”’ to attract attention—and it’s working. A study from Montclair State University shows that Musk’s use of the r-word was linked to a 200% increase in X users using the word in posts.
While many people will shrug it off under the pretense that it’s “just a joke,” or that “kids will be kids,” at what point do we push back and ask, what is so funny about being autistic? What about the autistic children who are left feeling ashamed of who they are after seeing these careless comments?
In a society where we are repeatedly told in grade school to “think before we speak” and “treat others the way we’d like to be treated,” these principles, though easily attainable, are rarely put into practice in the real world. If we genuinely want a more inclusive society, then normalizing slurs through silence and complicity are not options.
When you find yourself being complicit in the constant ridicule of populations historically targeted by hate speech, the joke is no longer on them—it’s on all of us. Once one slur directed at one group becomes normalized, another aimed at a different group will follow, and we’ll all be set back generations.
