my timing, joining tech dot 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

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.

the election

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

Once of the 2 officers actually took the time to help me (while the other was an abusive asshole himself. Considering there were two, one man, one woman, 40%, it tracks eh?) giving me resources and helping 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 1, 2022.

By that point, my ex had already violated it once. He would go on to violate it again.

at the same time, my actions to find resources to search and look for how I could help myself... mandated many google searches. i was in a liminal space, where i wasn't safe but had gained some safety

i was in wisconsin at the time and 2022 was actually a crucial election for the state. 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?

Evers, the democrat governor of WI held back the worst the WI legislative body tried to do repeatedly. He was reliably willing to use whatever executive powers he had (and WI has a very magical veto law) to actually improve the lives of his constituents.

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 national money was coming in, flooding WI politics on every level in 2022.

now, remember, my "anonymized" search data was full of incredibly useful information for advertisers: i was a victim of domestic violence.

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 very, very juicy target for political advertising.

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

similarly, ads for evers told me mitchell would laxen gun laws so my ex would be able to own a gun and come kill me etc etc

this wasn't enough.

that "anonymized data" clearly wasn't because i had to stop checking my 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