My name is Cassidy Huff and I’m an 18 year old, disabled disability rights activist. I have a very rare type of genetic dwarfism that not only affects every aspect of my daily life, but it also makes me appear younger than I actually am.

I have been fighting for disability rights and sharing my story of growing up with a disability on my Instagram for several years, and only recently have I started posting daily videos on TikTok. I posted my first video on TikTok on October 27th, 2020 and it instantly gained a lot more attention than I was expecting. Within two days I went from having seven followers to having ten thousand!

I was elated, like anyone would be! I had been fighting to be heard for so many years, and here I was finally getting my chance to reach thousands of people a day! On my new platform, I started posting educational videos on disability rights and disability issues, and for
several weeks, I didn’t get any hate! I went live several times a week and built relationships with my followers while I watched them connect and build relationships with each other on my livestreams! I had my own not-so-little family that was growing by the thousands every day! I
was even able to join the Creator Fund! It all seemed too good to be true! Spoiler alert . . . it was.

One night, I decided to post a video about an ableist slur. I didn’t realize at the time how many people were uneducated about this specific slur and how damaging it is to the disabled community because I had grown up knowing these things. I’ll cut to the chase, the video took off
rapidly. Within hours it had hundreds of thousands of views, likes were pouring in by the thousands every minute, and the hate comments began to start. Hundreds of them. Every day.

Imagine being an 18 year old college student who uses your platform to educate, you post a video, not really thinking anything of it. And then hundreds of people every hour are now telling you that you don’t deserve to live, that you don’t deserve rights, calling you the slur that
you spent the whole minute talking about, and many other horrific things. Comments were pouring in by the thousands, and I didn’t know what to do.

So as any other human being in my position would do, anytime I saw a hateful comment, I reported it to TikTok. TikTok came back every single time and told me that these comments “didn’t go against community guidelines”, even though they clearly did. But TikTok claimed that there was nothing they could do.

The hate inevitably slowed down and eventually I learned how to deal with hateful comments. However, these people then started flooding my livestreams every time I would go live on the app. They would quickly be muted by one of my moderators, but not before they typed a bunch of comments calling me all kinds of names that included ableist slurs, and
everything else you can imagine. Again, I did nothing. There was nothing I could do.

Until one night, I had been on this specific livestream for about three hours. I was celebrating the fact that I had just hit fifty thousand followers! I was excited and so were my followers! We played AmongUs, talked, laughed, and I ended the night by listening to my followers rant in the comment section about things that were going on in their lives that they felt they needed to talk about. Approximately thirty people and I sat there listening and reading comments from one individual person rant at a time. We gave advice when needed and then the next person would go. We had a system that worked for us. This was a safe space that so many people needed, especially during this time, and I was honored that I could provide that. All of the sudden, in the middle of this incredibly sentimental exchange of feelings, two people came into the livestream and flooded the chat with hateful messages about me and my
community. My moderators were very fast at muting the trolls and they logged off. However, within the next ten minutes, my livestream abruptly ended and a banner popped up on my screen that read: “Livestream banned”.

I looked further into it and discovered that certain people had reported me for “not meeting TikTok’s age requirement”, so TikTok permanently banned me from going live. I appealed it, of course. But it’s been a month and a half since this incident and my appeal still hasn’t even been viewed yet. I’m still wrongfully banned from livestreaming on TikTok...permanently.

TikTok, I am absolutely appalled at your ableism. Yes, I may appear younger than I actually am because of something that’s completely out of my control. I’m 18 years old and a part of the TikTok Creator Fund, yet I’m still permanently banned from livestreaming on your platform because I “don’t meet the age requirements”, please tell me how that works. So I’m permanently banned from livestreaming because a couple of internet trolls decided to report me since they were muted from commenting on my livestream for being ableist. Yet, I get bullied by thousands of people whose comments were reported and those don’t
violate community guidelines?!

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the community that I’ve been able to build through this platform. But it’s blatant discrimination against marginalized groups is absolutely disgusting. TikTok...LISTEN TO US!!! And please, let me go live again!!!