Influencing through advocacy: Parents of children with disability giving and seeking support on Instagram

In this article, I examine how parents raising children with disabilities are using Instagram to advocate for the rights of their children, and how these practices can be understood as a form of non-commercial influencing. I study how these practices enable the creation of supportive networks as the basis of performing advocacy regarding disability rights. Based on interviews with six mothers who use Instagram to share insights from their everyday lives, the analysis explores how their content curation and network building provides support and enables advocacy with the purpose of influencing public opinions about disability. Despite lacking commercial interests, their sustained engagement, storytelling, and ability to mobilise audiences position them as influencers within the online disability community.