The Trump Administration Wants to Snoop on Disabled Americans

The White House and the Social Security Administration have a new scheme to pore over disabled Americans’ social media accounts

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty

If you apply for disability insurance under the Social Security Administration, you might want to stay off Instagram.

The Trump White House and the Social Security Administration (SSA) have a new scheme to expand the federal government’s ability to snoop on the social media accounts of disabled Americans. The plan, which appears in this year’s SSA budget proposal (and was first reported on by the New York Times), hinges on the government’s ability to scoop up pictures and posts that might reveal whether someone is faking a disability. The budget also calls for cuts to Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) — not the first such proposal under the Trump administration. The new program is designed to solve a problem — widespread disability fraud — that experts say does not exist. In fact, there is no evidence of such large-scale malfeasance. Trying to adjudicate disability by monitoring social media will be, at best, an exercise in bias confirmation and, at worst, will represent a major expansion of the surveillance state, focused on some of America’s most vulnerable citizens.

SSDI provides a small amount of monthly financial support — the average is about $1,200 — for individuals ruled sufficiently disabled, based on one’s ability to work and the severity of a relevant condition. Standards to qualify for SSDI are already extremely high (arguably too high); many disabled people who cannot work have had to wait years to receive the benefit. While fraud does of course occur, it’s rare: The Washington Post reports that the SSA administered $8.1 billion in fraudulent payments between 2011 and 2015 — just over 1 percent of total disability outlays. (By contrast, last year the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for hundreds of billions, possibly trillions, of dollars.)

While Americans across the political spectrum have long supported Social Security, such sympathy doesn’t always extend to its disabled contingent. Too many Americans believe that “disabled deadbeats” go onto disability because they are too lazy to work. Republicans in particular have been gunning for SSDI for years. Donald Trump’s budget proposals have consistently advocated cutting total funding for SSDI; the president’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, once called SSDI a “very wasteful program” and reportedly convinced Trump of its ills simply by labeling it as “welfare.” Senator Rand Paul once complained that over half its recipients suffered nothing worse than anxiety or a sore back, calling them “malingerers.” Paul’s and Mulvaney’s comments reflect a broader Republican narrative of the disabled community as the “undeserving poor,” a (largely racialized) trope the GOP has deployed since the days of Ronald Reagan.

“The idea is to have machines investigate you before you are a suspect as a precondition of receiving a benefit.”

Under current rules, the Office of the Inspector General can already draw on social media data when fraud is suspected and report its findings back to the SSA. Launching a fraud investigation typically requires a referral from other government agencies or law enforcement, which operates as a kind due process check before OIG investigators start to dig into your personal life. The investigators share their findings with the Social Security Disability adjudicators. The new SSA plan suggests removing that minimal protection by “evaluating how social media could be used by disability adjudicators in assessing the consistency and supportability of evidence in a claimant’s case file.” In other words, anyone tasked with determining disability would be empowered to snoop through your Facebook photos at any time, rather than only after a fraud referral.

Matthew Cortland, a lawyer with expertise in disability law, including the SSA process, says opening up social media to adjudicators will be disastrous. “The SSA process is so difficult and claimant hostile that even people with multiple well-documented disabilities — disabilities that completely preclude employment and result in homelessness — are routinely denied benefits,” he says. But he adds that even if someone makes it through this vetting process, they aren’t safe: “After someone is determined to be disabled by SSA—as in they’re approved for benefits—they will most likely face a ‘continuing disability review’ in as little as one year to ‘make sure they’re still disabled.’ There’s very, very little legal representation available for people in that situation. And if this social media ‘evidence’ is used at that stage, it’s going to be a disaster.” A spokesperson for the SSA said that it “studied strategies of other agencies and private entities to determine how social media might be used to evaluate disability applications.”

The proposed budget cuts have little chance of taking effect, but this expansion of social media surveillance might make it through. Should that happen, disabled Americans, fearful of a watchdog government, may resort to self-censorship online, in the process losing out on critical opportunities to build online communities. Francis (whose name has been changed, as have all others in this section) lies in bed “five days out of seven” due to migraines and can’t work, but on good days, Francis might roam about the city or travel. Monty, 27, is a self-sufficient student most of the time, but “due to systemic bodily damage, such as being prone to pressure sores, a fused lower spine and lack of lower-back muscles, constant bladder infections, and a myriad of other illnesses, I often go through periods of inactivity, decreased work effectiveness, and inability to participate in groups.” Constance, who is currently on SSDI, has cerebral palsy and loves to travel and share her experiences on Facebook. She points out that Facebook’s Memories feature emphasizes posts and photos from many years ago, offering an outdated look at a person’s mobility. “My current profile pictures might even be many years old: from high school or college, when I participated in concerts and plays. They’re not indicative of my current mobility at all,” she says. In interviews with several dozen concerned individuals, some currently on SSDI and some expecting to need it in the future, all stressed the variability of the ways their disability manifests from day to day.

By suggesting that disability fraud can be detected by just looking at posts and pictures, the government is indirectly promoting one of the worst stereotypes about disability — namely, that it must always be immediately recognizable. In reality, the impact of disability on function can vary widely from day to day or year to year. The Twitter hashtag #AmbulatoryWheelchairUsersExist, launched in 2017 by artist and activist Annie Segarra, provides testimony to the basic fact that such users do indeed exist while also documenting the prejudice they encounter. Social media, as disability justice activist “Eb” points out over Twitter, is the principle space in which disabled people organize, sometimes for the express purpose of debunking mainstream myths around disability. “We explain about good days and bad days. We’re transparent about the parts of being Disabled people don’t understand,” Eb writes. “We try to shift the narrative by showing ourselves NOT MISERABLE ALL THE DAMN TIME.” Many wheelchair users walk, for example, and psychiatric symptoms vary in their activity. Disabled people who legitimately qualify for SSDI may well post pictures that push against the stereotype of total impairment. But now the very tool disabled people have used to demonstrate the variability and diversity of disability will be turned against them by the federal government.

Meanwhile, the SSA is pioneering what it calls the Anti-Fraud Enterprise Solution (AFES), which will “integrate data from multiple sources and use industry-proven predictive analytics software to identify high-risk transactions for further review. “‘Industry-proven predictive analytics’ is code for big data and machine learning,” says Bruce Schneier, a technology analyst and author of Data and Goliath. “Presumably the idea is to have machines investigate you before you are a suspect as a precondition of receiving a benefit.”