my timing, joining tech dot lgbt (@deilann@tech.lgbt) was alongside a lot of twitter refugees

but i wasn't a twitter refugee

i hadn't touched twitter since 2012 or so, except when i was mandated to do so for contract reasons

similarly, i hadn't touched facebook in the same time period except when pressured to do so

i joined fedi to experience social media again, not replace my current social media.it was a response to a completely different event that happened in late 2022.

it was an election year

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march 22nd, 2022 after years of domestic violence reports, the police finally removed my ex from our shared house and put us under a 72-hour no contact order.

one of the 2 officers actually took the time to help me (the other was an abusive asshole himself. considering there were two, one man, one woman, 40%, it tracks eh?). she gave me resources and helped me form a plan.

in those 72 hours I managed to get a domestic violence advocate and file for a restraining order despite having been so trapped by abuse I didn't have an ID or independent means of transportation.

i was granted the restraining order April 1st, 2022

by that point, my ex had already violated it once and had been charged with a misdemeanor for assaulting me, with a domestic abuse modifier. he would go on to violate it again and rack up more charges with domestic abuse modifiers the next year, involving another individual.

through all this, i knew that even with my advocate, i had to be my own advocate but my actions to find resources to search and look for how i could help myself... i performed many google searches. i was in a liminal space, where i wasn't safe but had gained some safety and i knew how tenuous my situation was and how vigilant i needed to be.

those searches though... are the only thing i can think of that resulted in what happened next.

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i was in wisconsin at the time and 2022 was an incredibly crucial election. not just for the state, but the whole of the US. wisconsin is heavily gerrymandered. the current maps had actually been deemed unconstitutional, but were still being used for the election because new maps hadn't been agreed upon. this had been the case for ... a decade at that point, IIRC?

this meant that the legislative body was incredibly right-leaning and repeatedly would pass vile and disgusting legislation. however, Evers, the democrat governor, kept the worst at bay. he was reliably willing to use all his executive powers (and WI has a very powerful veto law that actually allows the governor to alter a bill while vetoing it) to actually improve the lives of his constituents or at least not make their lives worse

WI barely went for Biden in 2020 and there were plans for a fake elector plot in the state. if evers lost, it would have national ramifications. so of course, national money was flooding WI politics on every level in 2022.

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now, remember, my “anonymized” search data was full of incredibly useful information for advertisers: i was a victim of domestic violence. we usually think of targeted advertisement as selling products, but there's far, far more money in selling ideas and politicians benefit heavily from this scheme.

as the election came closer, i had to stop interacting with anything that might result in targeted advertising. i shrank back out of the world. because i was a too juicy of a target for political advertising to let go of.

every ad that was served to me tried to convince me that if i did not vote for the candidate it was supporting, my ex was going to get a gun and kill me

this is not hyperbole. advertisements for the republican candidate focused on how evers was soft on crime, supported bail reform, defunding the police, and restriction on gun access so my ex was going to come kill me and there was nothing i could do about it

one of these ads involved a woman on the phone while her ex was outside threatening her, calling 911 and being told there were no officers available to help.

similarly, ads for evers told me mitchell would laxen gun laws so my ex would be able to own a gun (he wasn't legally allowed to own one because of the restraining order) and come kill me. the ads for evers and his lt governor were... less triggering, but still just as inescapable.

but withdrawing from the internet wasn't enough.

that “anonymized data” clearly wasn't because i had to stop checking my physical mail

my mailbox was littered with flyers specifically talking about how bad both candidates were with regards to protecting victims of domestic violence and how my ex was going to come kill me

and i realized, once things got marginally better, after the election was over

that what this had effectively done was silenced me

silenced me and my story. made me feel unsafe to talk about the realities of my experience as a survivor of domestic violence and abuse

because if i talked about it on any form of social media, i had not just provided that tasty data to target me, the product, with ads relating to my fucking trauma, but they owned it. it was no longer mine

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but on tech dot lgbt i don't feel that pressure, i don't feel like my very story and identity is being stolen

i feel safe to be who i am

yes, my information can be scraped

it can be stolen

but the action of speaking here isn't inherently surrendering my story to the machine, myself to the machine (please also see @ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt talking about this in a reply to the original thread)

fedi let me exist, let me feel like i am allowed to be part of the world even after everything that i've been through

decentralized social media matters

this was originally posted as a thread on my mastodon account @deilann@tech.lgbt here. it has been edited in parts to fix grammatical errors, for clarity, and to include additional details that were not part of the original thread.

#SocialMedia #Fediverse #DomesticViolence #BigData #Musings

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