bbc“Stop them!” I screamed as I sped through London’s Finsbury Park station in my electric wheelchair. He was surrounded by travelers. Nobody intervened.
I was traveling alone and was checking my route home in a hallway, when I suddenly felt someone looming over me.
I looked up to find a man standing inches from my face, looking at me. He was motionless and staring into my eyes. I was paralyzed, I thought they were going to attack me.
The man smiled, stuck out his tongue, and put on a blank expression. Then I realized that someone was filming me from behind. As I spun around in my wheelchair, more members of the group joined them through the turnstiles.
Furious, I chased after them, hoping they would delete the video. But just as I approached, the men ran up the stairs, laughing. That was the last time I saw them.
I became the latest victim of the “tongue out” TikTok prank, where people stick their tongues out at strangers while making a face and filming their reaction, but this time twisted to mock me for my disability.
The situation seemed familiar to him. A year ago, I wrote about how I faced TikTok-inspired disability bullying from school kids yelling “Timmy” at me outside my local train station.
This was in reference to a disabled character in the satirical series South Park, who uses a wheelchair and can only shout his own name, usually loudly and uncontrollably. Revived on TikTok decades later and stripped of its comedic context, imitating Timmy has once again become a way to mock disabled people.
That time I chose to bring the children directly into the conversation, hoping that it could be a learning experience to challenge their prejudices.
This time, at Finsbury Park, I took action.
Fed up with feeling helpless, I immediately reported the incident as a hate crime, now defined in the UK by law to include acts perceived as hostile towards protected characteristics such as disability.
The British Transport Police (BTP) confirmed that my experience was similar to a series of other incidents which appeared to have been fueled by the TikTok craze.
People being personally attacked by those seeking influence online is an area of ”growing concern”, according to Ciaran O’Connor of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that focuses on online hate.
He says social media algorithms “prioritize shock, confrontation, and adversarial encounters” – or, as many of us know, “anger baiting” – over empathy.
Online hate ‘will go viral’
The original TikTok prank, copied by the men who attacked me, is not as sinister as you might expect. It was popularized by young American influencers like Pink Cardigan this summer, who racked up millions of likes staring, tongues out, at bewildered customers through store and restaurant windows.
The comedy relies on the reactions of people who “aren’t in on the joke,” explains Aidan Walker, whose videos about internet culture have racked up millions of views on TikTok. The trash-talking trend, like many of its kind, began as “unpleasant and inconsiderate, rather than inherently hostile,” he says.
When I was harassed, adult men, apparently in their early 20s, chose to use the trend to mock disability, perhaps to differentiate their burden. They probably “acted with the intention of going viral,” O’Connor adds.
I have yet to find footage of my incident uploaded to TikTok or other social media platforms, but this does not diminish the possible intent.
TikTok says the vast majority of the trend’s uploaded content is not targeted or hateful and therefore does not violate its policies.
The platform’s community guidelines prohibit hate speech, hate behavior, or the promotion of hate ideologies, including discrimination on the basis of disability.
When BBC News reported on a video of teenagers appearing to target a man with Down syndrome by adopting the tongue-out pose outside his window, moderators removed the video.
Reluctance to report
O’Connor says viral trends have been distorted to also target other minority groups, including LGBTQ+ people and immigrants, and content creators are motivated by an endless quest for engagement.
Home Office statistics for England and Wales show hate crime continued to rise this year, driven by racial and religious offences.
While recorded disability hate crimes fell by 8% in 2025, this follows sharp increases in recent years, and disability charities warn of a distorted picture.
Last year, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) described disability hate crime as one of the “most widespread and least reported” forms of discrimination.
The apparent drop in hate crime reports against disabled people reflects “a lack of confidence in reporting, not a reduction in hostility”, says Ali Gunn of disability charity United Response.
The charity’s research suggests that only 29.9% of disabled people report crimes against them, and only 2% of public order offenses result in convictions, the lowest figure of any minority group.
I experienced these difficulties firsthand when reporting my incident. Although the definition of a disability hate crime covers a wide range of acts perceived as hostile (well beyond verbal abuse), I was initially told that the case would not proceed because CCTV would not have audio and no ableist or derogatory language had been used.
I backed away, emphasizing the specific intimidation of being surrounded in my wheelchair, and asked if they had studied the security cameras. It was then that my case was reopened and taken over by another officer.
The footage has since been analyzed and photographs of the suspects have been transmitted to the BTP investigation team.
TfL apologized for the incident and the way BTP initially handled it. TfL Commissioner Andy Lord wrote to me to express his disgust at the harassment I faced and affirm TfL’s commitment to improving the reporting and awareness of disability hate crime.
Journey to change?
The need to tackle hate crime on and around public transport is clear. TfL data shows that overall hate crime reporting on its services increased by 39.7% between 2022/23 and 2024/25, with a slight fall between 2023/24 and 2024/25.
Last month, comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy, had wine thrown at her during what she described as an “ableist and homophobic attack” on the train home from a gig with fellow comedian Lee Peart.
“They mocked our voices, yelled insults at us, and even threw a (plastic, thankfully) wine bottle,” Jones wrote in a post on Instagram. “It was a harsh reminder that my cerebral palsy makes me stand out and is often used as a weapon against me.”
From my experience in Finsbury Park, what has stayed with me, perhaps more than the filming, is how the bystanders did not intervene.
It made me realize that viewers can feel incredibly conflicted about acting.
This hesitation to intervene is at the heart of TfL’s new Act Like a Friend campaign, which encourages passengers to strike up a conversation with the person being addressed and behave as if they know each other.
@itsleepeartThe network encourages customers to report all incidents they believe are motivated by hatred and hostility toward police, including hateful filming.
“Everyone deserves to be and feel safe when traveling on our network,” says Siwan Hayward, director of security policing at TfL. “The behavior Alex describes is deplorable.”
United Response’s Gunn called hate filming a growing trend and deeply distressing for disabled people.
He urged social media companies to “strengthen moderation” around viral challenges by improving systems for victims or their advocates to flag harmful content.
This includes not only removing offensive content, but also ensuring that users who post it face harsher penalties.
“Being mocked or secretly filmed strips people of their dignity and reinforces the message that public spaces are not safe or welcoming,” she says. “These incidents are combined with more overt forms of disability hate crimes and share the same underlying problem of hostility and exclusion.”
Four months after what happened, I am quite discouraged. While I’m glad I took action to the best of my ability, the harassment I’ve experienced in recent years has left me keenly aware that the fight is now playing out on two fronts: online and in the real world.
So what to do? It is clear that broader change is needed to address hate in any sphere. But on an individual level, nothing is more powerful than taking care of each other, beyond the screens. Hate thrives on invisibility.
