Stop Sharing Those Feel-Good Cochlear Implant Videos

By Morgan Leahy

The video opens with a cute baby lying in his mother’s arms. They are sitting in a doctor’s office, about to activate a cochlear implant, a device that will help the child hear. The doctor turns on the implant, the baby’s mother says his name… and he smiles so wide his pacifier falls out of his mouth. “A tear jerker if I ever saw one,” say the comments. “I cry every time I watch this.” “Science be praised!” “God be praised!” It’s been viewed over 4.5 million times.

There are dozens of videos like this one online, and they often get millions of views and hundreds of comments about how miraculous it is for a person to suddenly be able to hear. But these videos, and the responses they generate, demonstrate an ignorance about cochlear implants and perpetuate dangerous misconceptions about deafness.

A cochlear implant is a medical device surgically placed in the inner ear, which transmits sound signals to the brain and can allow some deaf people to hear again, or hear for the first time. For hearing people, a video of a deaf person experiencing sound may look like a scientific and personal triumph. But for a deaf person, even a cochlear implant user like me, these “feel-good” videos are often a bit tasteless at best, ableist at worst.