Disability rights group reaches out to YouTuber Park Wi amid hate speech backlash

The Korea Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination, known as KSADD, has sent a message of support to YouTuber Park Wi, who found himself at the center of controversy after posting CCTV footage of himself falling from a wheelchair while disembarking from a KTX train.

On Wednesday, KSADD shared on its official SNS accounts a post written by Kim Sang-hee, director of the Nodeul Disability Independent Living Center. The move was widely interpreted as an expression of solidarity with Kim's view that criticism of Park should not be allowed to expand into broader hatred toward people with disabilities or attacks on their demands for rights.

In her post, Kim began by acknowledging that she had not personally been a fan of Park's content. She said his videos often framed disability as a personal inconvenience to be overcome through the kindness and consideration of non-disabled people, with relatively little attention paid to the social structures that produce disability in the first place.

Kim said Park had largely presented himself as a person with a disability who adapted well to a non-disabled society, adding, "Although we shared the same keyword of 'disability,' there were times he seemed so far removed from my world that he felt to me like a 'non-disabled man in a wheelchair.'"

However, she said watching the KTX incident and the controversy that followed had changed her thinking.

"It reaffirmed for me that even someone who seemed to inhabit such a different world from mine can, at any moment in an able-bodied-centric society, become a target of discrimination and hatred simply for being disabled," Kim said.

The controversy began when Park posted CCTV footage on his YouTube channel showing him falling forward while disembarking from a KTX train last month. His wheelchair had caught on the foot of a social service worker who was holding the lift ramp in place, causing him to topple forward. The video also showed Park confronting the worker and station staff afterward.

After the footage was made public, criticism mounted over whether it had been appropriate to post the video — which reaches an audience of about 1 million subscribers — even after the social service worker had apologized for the mistake. Park deleted the video and issued an apology, saying he had "failed to consider the position of the worker who had done their best to help me and apologized sincerely."

Kim said, however, that whether the privacy and portrait rights of those shown in the CCTV footage had been adequately protected was a separate matter, and that "the two cannot be treated as the same thing as the disability-based hatred that has been directed at him."

"Thinking that posting the video was inappropriate does not give anyone the right to mock his disability, attack disabled people's demands for mobility rights, or direct hatred at his partner, who had nothing to do with the incident," Kim said, adding that the backlash against Park reflected the nature of an able-bodied-centric society.

She said Park may have believed that when he posted the video of himself falling, people would empathize with his grievance and join him in questioning the circumstances that caused the fall — just as supporters had rallied around his content before. "But people with disabilities are welcomed when they inspire, and become a nuisance when they demand their rights," she said.

She explained that disabled people are easily celebrated when they live cheerfully and express gratitude for the help and consideration of non-disabled people, but are frequently accused of being a burden or seeking special treatment the moment they assert their rights, hold someone accountable, or raise inconvenient questions for society.

For these reasons, Kim said she did not want to offer Park simple words of comfort. Instead, she said she wanted to extend her hand to him, expressing hope that he would "safely find his way out of the swamp of meaningless hateful comments."

The gesture was an invitation to begin a shared conversation about the mobility and broader rights of people with disabilities, prompted by the incident.

"I would love for us to read the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities together, run mobility rights campaigns together, and talk about the rights of disabled people not in the language of charity and consideration, but in the language of rights," Kim said. "The world of resistance is far more draining than the world of inspiration, but still — it is quite worth living in." She closed her post with the words: "Let's fight together now."

Online, the backlash has spread beyond the CCTV controversy to include personal attacks on Park and disability-related hate speech. As the controversy grew, Park stepped down from his role as a Seoul Metropolitan Government promotional ambassador, and his YouTube channel has continued to lose subscribers.