Abstract
Content creators who are themselves disabled and post primarily educational content about disability, known as Lived Experience Disability Educators (LEDEs), fill a unique and important niche on Instagram. While their journeys may have some overlap with other, previously studied, content creators, their experiences differ in key ways as well due to their status as marginalized individuals speaking openly on their experiences living with a marginalized identity. The Instagram algorithm is complex and often pushes LEDE content to users outside of their followers and outside of their target demographic resulting in an experience of vulnerable virality. As a result of this, LEDEs receive feedback to their work at the extreme ends of human feeling and emotion. Much of this feedback is harmful and damaging, but that the communities LEDEs build online and the positive feedback which allows them to see the impact of their work in real time motivates them to keep creating. Additionally, even when branching out and engaging in work opportunities outside of their Instagram platforms, LEDEs utilize the benefits provided by their digital work to generate many of these engagements and as a hosting site for proof of their multi-faceted work.