The Trump administration wants to use Facebook and other social media to help identify people who are receiving Social Security disability benefits without being truly disabled.
Source: On Disability and on Facebook? Uncle Sam Wants to Watch What You Post
I understand the desire to reduce fraud, but…
My social media feed is full of people who are truly disabled and can’t get access to SSI or SSDI. Anything that makes this harder is a problem.
AND
This could go wrong in so many ways!
“But advocates for people with disabilities say the use of social media in this way would be dangerous because photos posted there do not always provide reliable evidence of a person’s current condition.
“It may be difficult to tell when a photograph was taken,” said Lisa D. Ekman, a lawyer who is the chairwoman of the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, a coalition of advocacy groups. “Just because someone posted a photograph of them golfing or going fishing in February of 2019 does not mean that the activity occurred in 2019.”
Moreover, people are more likely to post pictures of themselves when they are happy and healthy than when they are in a wheelchair or a hospital bed.”
Folks who are chronically ill and disabled are already saddled with being disbelieved that they are ill. As if being ill means that you aren’t human, that you might not have saved all your spoons for one night out, that you can’t ever do anything enjoyable!
I once had someone assert that I couldn’t have been ill because I clicked the “interested” button on a FB event post! Never mind I do that all the time to keep track of pipe dreams that I can rarely realize.
This is potentially dangerous.