Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).
Her “real identity” — the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about radical politics — joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.
Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people — and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.
Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.
“It’s not just sex workers who are careful to shield their identities,” she said to me via Skype. “The people who hire sex workers are also very concerned with anonymity so they’re using alternative emails and alternative names. And sometimes they have phones that they only use for this, for hiring women. You have two ends of people using heightened security, because neither end wants their identity being revealed. And they’re having their real names connected on Facebook.”
When Leila queried secret support groups for sex workers on Facebook, others said it had happened to them too.
"With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?“
“The worst nightmare of sex workers is to have your real name out there, and Facebook connecting people like this is the harbinger of that nightmare,” she said. “With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?”
It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer. The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations. Most of what Facebook does reveal about the feature is on a help page, which says that the suggestions “come from things like” mutual friends, shared networks or groups, or “contacts you’ve uploaded.”
When the suggestions turn out to beunnerving, that explanation is both vague and woefully incomplete. A Facebook spokesman told me this summer that there are more than 100 signals that go into PYMK. All someone like Leila — who was not connected to her clients by anything like mutual friends, networks, groups, or contacts — can know is that the data that exposed her must be something else, in that large undefined set of factors.
Leila suspects either that Facebook collected contact information from other apps on her phone or that it used location information, noticing that her and her clients’ smartphones were in the same place at the same time.
“We do not use information from third party apps to show friend suggestions in People You May Know,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. Facebook has said before that it doesn’t use location information for People You May Know, and the spokesperson confirmed that “People You May Know suggestions are not informed by your smartphone’s Location Services.”
So the linkage between Leila and her clients remains a mystery. While the algorithmic black box that is PYMK is simply creepy to most of us, the intrusive network analysis can have serious consequences for people in the sex work and porn industry. One sex toy reviewer devoted a section of her digital security advice to the feature, her cleverest suggestion being to choose a profile photo that doesn’t show your face.
“People think because you have sex on camera, privacy isn’t a big deal for you,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, a California-based advocacy group for adult performers. “But in this industry, privacy is so important. Performers worry about stalkers on a daily basis.”
Stabile says concerns about People You May Know also go the other way, when people’s accounts for their sex work persona are recommended to people they know in their real, vanilla lives like relatives and friends.
That’s what Ela Darling worries about. Darling, who manages virtual reality adult broadcasting at CAM4, has been working in pornography for eight years, but her family members don’t know that.
"I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook.“
“I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook,” Darling told me by phone.
To combat this, she searches Facebook every few weeks for the last names of her family and extended family to see if any of her relatives have joined the network or created a new account. If they have, she blocks them.
Darling used to have a second, private account under her legal name for connecting with people she knew in her normal, vanilla life, but it was getting recommended to her fans, revealing her “real” identity to them. Some of them began harassing her and trying to track down her family.
“We’re living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people,” Darling said. She’s not sure how Facebook linked her porn identity to her legal identity, but it meant one had to go. She deleted her private account a few years ago, leaving only her public, porn one.
“Facebook isn’t a luxury,” Darling said. “It’s a utility in our lives. For something that big to be so secretive and powerful in how it accumulates your information is unnerving.”
The outing problem is, like Facebook’s ongoing fake-news scandals, a result of the company’s growth-above-all strategy: First round up as many users as possible, then start cleaning up (or not) the side effects of operating at that scale. People You May Know may be incidental to an individual user’s experience, but it extends the reach and density of the network.
“For sex workers, this is a huge threat. This is life or death for us,” Leila said.
An obvious solution, from a user’s point of view, would be for Facebook to fully explain what data it uses to make friend suggestions, and to allow users to filter it or opt out of the People You May Know feature entirely. That way, someone concerned about having their identity exposed — whether a sex worker, a domestic violence victim, or a political activist — wouldn’t have to worry about having their account shown to someone who shouldn’t see it.
“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful.”
“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful,” said the spokesperson. “For example, even for people who have been on Facebook for a long time and already have lots of friends, most of us like to know when someone we know has joined Facebook for the first time.”
According to the Facebook spokesperson, while there is no way to clearly and directly opt out of the People You May Know feature, there’s an undocumented trick that does enable users to stop appearing in it. It just requires them to shut off their ability to receive any friend requests at all.
“People can always control who can send them friend requests by visiting their account settings,” said the spokesperson. “If they select ‘no one,’ they won’t appear in others’ People You May Know.”
This solution, which is not explained in any of Facebook’s many help pages, would allow Leila to protect herself from exposure, although at the expense of one of Facebook’s basic functions. And it wouldn’t work for Darling as her account exists for fans to find and follow. So the need for a PYMK opt-out remains.
“We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “For people who choose to maintain a separate identity, we’ve put safeguards in place to help them understand their privacy choices, moderate comments, block people, control location sharing, and report abusive content.”
Facebook also says you can just “x” out anyone who appears in “People You May Know” that you don’t want to know, but sometimes just appearing there means the damage is already done.
As a sex worker, I would just like to add:
If your favorite stripper/escort/cam person etc. personal account is recommended to you over facebook, the best thing you can do is NOT add them, and instead just let them know the next time that you interact with them during an appointment/at the club etc. Please don’t add them so you can try to tell them through their personal account-it’s dangerous, and scary. Block us, don’t look at said accounts, and notify us as soon as you can. Most check for that kinda shit regularly, but a heads up is always nice.
On the reverse, if one of your loved ones sex worker accounts is suggested to you over social media, do not follow it without their permission. Let them know that their account was recommended to you, block them if they ask you too (and/or don’t get offended if they block you), and most importantly do not tell anyone else you/they know. Outting them to other relatives/friends is really dangerous, so please don’t do that.
Civilians (non-sex workers) please reblog!
A couple of things that may be influencing this.
Hopefully these people are using different browsers for their vanilla and sex worker activities. If they aren’t, they should start now. Don’t trust incognito mode.
The next one is harder – the ip address. I know this is one of the factors in PYMK, because when I was on facebook at work, it started recommending co-workers. The problem that the ip address presents is that even if you are using different computers, if you are using the same hardware to connect to the internet, the ip addresses are almost identical, so that can be used to associate your vanilla and sex worker identities (think apartments in a building). I don’t know how to defeat that, short of getting separate ISPs for your different lives.
Having one account that you only use on your computer, through you home internet, and one that you only use on your phone, using your phone’s data, should work as long as you never use you home internet on your phone.
Frankly, FB has a crazy number of ways of connecting two different identities, up to even facial recognition. Sex workers (or anyone else who *needs* to keep separate identities) probably shouldn’t use FB at all, better to stick to things like twitter, tumblr, personal web pages and sites dedicated to that.
That issue seems to be getting worse, which was kinda my suspicion anyway.
Feeling freshly overwhelmed, as is hopefully understandable. But, I did come up with some ideas.
Following through is the hard part, especially with already pretty much operating in emergency mode where what few spoons are available have basically been going into getting through the day. And of course worrying about what I haven’t been able to do has been sending it into deficit a lot. Been an issue for a while, but the energy available is probably at an all-time low.
Anyway, I didn’t say before, but I finally did hear back from that advocacy organization, and they did point me at another one that is supposed to cover our area. Looking at their site, I get a stronger impression that I am just Not Disabled Enough on paper to qualify for much assistance. (Even if I were, not having officially lost my civil rights in any way–yet– might be enough to get shifted to rock bottom priority.) And that it might go beyond limited funding. That was just the vibe I got.
But, their NHS complaints service specifically sounded a lot more possibly inclusive. It probably couldn’t hurt to try to get them to help with the “dropped from ophthalmology, basically because I am multiply disabled” rationing by obstacle course situation. To hopefully get some of the specific concerns there addressed as well. (No energy to get into that.)
Maybe, if I detail the larger situation and am very lucky, someone might be willing to refer me for some other help dealing with the unfamiliar system. Not counting on it from the sound of things and general experiences here so far.
(How does whoever I might be dealing with feel about weird foreigners/gender variant people/etc.? We just don’t know. And the staff looked very older White British.)
But, hopefully they can at least get ophthalmology willing to see me again when I have probably already permanently lost some sight due to bad accessibility.
Trying not to get hung up to a paralyzing extent on that right now, but of course I am concerned about the likelihood of my being able to make and navigate any future appointments without some of the other underlying issues being addressed. Including access to (competent, halfway respectful) basic diabetes treatment, to hopefully help keep everything from continuing to get worse.
And of course I keep kicking myself for “letting” things get to this point at all…basically by being disabled and otherwise marginalized, without necessary supports available. I know it’s fucked up, but these messages are persistent And not just something my own personal craziness cooked up.
Anyway, I’m trying to figure out how to get that underway in spite of already low energy getting sucked by terror. And fighting PTSD. It might help, and probably couldn’t make the situation worse.
In the meantime, if it get too bad, there is a limited hours emergency eye clinic at the local hospital. (Would definitely drag Mr. C along for whatever backup he could provide, especially after my half-deaf ass’s last experience with the regular ophthalmology clinic there and their terrible communication/mixups I witnessed in one visit/etc.)
Assuming I could make it through triage–particularly with the atmosphere right now–and ophthalmology didn’t just turn me away because I did get dropped from regular services.
Still, it is another option. And “I am probably having retinal bleeding as we speak” should hopefully qualify as an urgent thing. Not so sure at this point, but hey.
men’s loyalty to violence is disturbing. when women want a life free of abuse, assault, threat, & coercion, men’s first suggestion is “learn to fight back. learn to defend yourself”. i don’t want my life to be a fight. i don’t want to “prove myself” through inflicting pain & fear.
i don’t find violence and physical conflict fulfilling or self-actualising.
they’re exhausting & dehumanizing
And it’s leaves the sick and disable without any help whatsoever, if the focus is always on fighting back
My greatest victory is that a friend and I once managed to explain this to an older man and make him realize why “I would have just punched him” is not a helpful response when women are telling you about how they were sexually assaulted. He appologized and learned.
All I hear when people say “just fight back” is “make sure they go for the other, ‘weaker’ girl.”
Also being obligated to defend that other girl doesn’t make the whole focus any better.
Much less address the fact that predators are likely to wait until their targets have no backup to pull shit. The base problem is predatory behavior.
Similarly, if the someone thinks it’s OK to behave in an abusive manner? A violent response isn’t magically going to teach them any lessons other than to be sneakier in the future.
Assuming they’ve somehow made it past kindergarten without learning that they’re expected to keep their hands to themselves, an ass-kicking is not going to fix that. Teaching them that lesson would not be the responsibility of someone they have just harmed, in any case. Never mind the more likely case where they know full well what they’re doing is wrong, and just don’t give a shit.
I am personally likely to fight someone who is threatening me anyway (ETA: or anyone else that I witness), but I’m not about to insist that’s the only proper course of action and a moral obligation. Or blame anyone who cannot or doesn’t want to respond to threats that way. Much less pretend that it is likely to fix literally any of the larger problems leading to the kind of violent situation where this idea even keeps being relevant.
Sometimes I can’t help but really wish that a few targeted beatdowns would fix some longterm systemic problems. But, that is some serious wishful thinking. Even before it gets turned to straight-up victim blaming.
people run “aesthetic blogs” where they just reblog pics of like neon lights and pools of water and weird textures and stuff and i don’t really get it but i like to look at those blogs, it’s nice to know that you guys are out there, always silent, never getting into fights, just reblogging pics of wrinkled plastic bags… keep doing ur thing
Asking as a tired Australian, why do Americans get so weird about ugg boots? “but like, are they REAL uggs?” they’re hideous and they’re made of sheep, Tiffany, just wear the things and be quiet
I did some digging and it turns out the answer is stranger than I thought.
Uggs were originally Australian in make and design, and the word “ugg” just refers to the style of boot here. Then some Australian fucker trademarked it in America and sold it to a massive American company in the 80s. Thus UGG became a brand. Americans recognise Ugg as a brand, and think it’s fashionable and cool to wear name-brand boots, while Australians just call every style of boot like that an Ugg and (as long as it’s real sheepskin) don’t tend to discriminate much.
Now that answers why Americans are so keen on the brand name, but there’s more.
What American law did was basically steal a generic term and style of shoe that had been used in Australia for decades, and then make it illegal for their competitors to use it as their own.
So their trademark means Australians cannot sell (Australian-made!) Uggs into the US. And there are legal battles occurring over the use of the term ‘ugg’. A delightful origin story of the term runs thus:
Australians have been making Ugg boots for half a century.
Graeme Spencer, who runs Huggy’s Ugg boot in South Australia, said it was his father Charlie Spencer who made the first Ugg boots and came up with the word Ugg.
“A customer of his came in and said they are the ugliest boots she had ever seen … And he just came up with U-G-G,” Mr Spencer said.
Australian senators are calling for the term ‘Ugg’ to be recognised as what it always has been – a generic term for footwear and not a brand name – because it bullies Australian manufacturers out of making their own product. Deckers, the brand owner, shuts down thousands of listings and chases out any trace of ‘counterfeit’ uggs (lmao). Even odder, in their war on ‘counterfeits’, Deckers tries to convince people that buying fake uggs basically equals supporting terrorism.
Australian Leather owner Eddie Oygur is seeking a separate ruling in Australia that Deckers is guilty of deceptive conduct, by trading under the name Ugg Australia when the company is based in California and its Ugg boots are made in China.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is considering the matter.
Mr Oygur has also asked the ACCC to investigate the Deckers’ website which warns consumers who buy so-called “fake” Ugg boots, not made by Deckers, that they could be supporting terrorism, mobsters or gangs.
The Ugg website states that “infamous terrorist groups, organised crime rings, and gangs such as the … Camorra … Chinese triads .. Russian mafia, Al Qaeda and Hezbullah finance their operations — including terrorism, drug, sex, and arms trafficking — through the sale and trafficking of counterfeits”.
I’ve met the horrible, nasty people who make counterfeit uggs. Her name’s Barb and she works at the local market. Her husband sews the Australian sheepskin himself, and she attaches the soles. These evil counterfeiters are mostly just Australians making and selling footwear like they always did.
So the American obsession with “real uggs” that I mocked so unthinkingly is actually the story of how a huge American company took something generic from Australia, then trademarked the brand, sued the pants off anyone who tried to use the word they’d been using for years, then further branded themselves as Ugg Australia even though it’s based in California and made in China, and started scaremongering to make people believe that ‘counterfeit uggs’ are evil, as if non-brand name sheep boots are on the same level as triads and the mafia, when it’s just Barb’s husband sewing in a shed.
Russian soldiers witness the awakening of an elder god.
Why does this stuff always happen in Russia? What are they doing?
Reality decided that’s the only place where it can cut lose, considering they don’t seem to give a fuck about anything.
“According to some of the YouTube comments, the fire was caused by burning zinc, and the screaming came from the underground pipes that had somewhat of a ‘flute’ effect when the air passed through the tubes.“
Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).
Her “real identity” — the public one, who lives in California, uses an academic email address, and posts about radical politics — joined Facebook in 2011. Her sex-work identity is not on the social network at all; for it, she uses a different email address, a different phone number, and a different name. Yet earlier this year, looking at Facebook’s “People You May Know” recommendations, Leila (a name I’m using using in place of either of the names she uses) was shocked to see some of her regular sex-work clients.
Despite the fact that she’d only given Facebook information from her vanilla identity, the company had somehow discerned her real-world connection to these people — and, even more horrifyingly, her account was potentially being presented to them as a friend suggestion too, outing her regular identity to them.
Because Facebook insists on concealing the methods and data it uses to link one user to another, Leila is not able to find out how the network exposed her or take steps to prevent it from happening again.
“It’s not just sex workers who are careful to shield their identities,” she said to me via Skype. “The people who hire sex workers are also very concerned with anonymity so they’re using alternative emails and alternative names. And sometimes they have phones that they only use for this, for hiring women. You have two ends of people using heightened security, because neither end wants their identity being revealed. And they’re having their real names connected on Facebook.”
When Leila queried secret support groups for sex workers on Facebook, others said it had happened to them too.
"With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?“
“The worst nightmare of sex workers is to have your real name out there, and Facebook connecting people like this is the harbinger of that nightmare,” she said. “With all the precautions we take and the different phone numbers we use, why the fuck are they showing up? How is this happening?”
It’s not a question that Facebook is willing to answer. The company is not forthcoming about how “People You May Know,” known internally as PYMK, makes its recommendations. Most of what Facebook does reveal about the feature is on a help page, which says that the suggestions “come from things like” mutual friends, shared networks or groups, or “contacts you’ve uploaded.”
When the suggestions turn out to beunnerving, that explanation is both vague and woefully incomplete. A Facebook spokesman told me this summer that there are more than 100 signals that go into PYMK. All someone like Leila — who was not connected to her clients by anything like mutual friends, networks, groups, or contacts — can know is that the data that exposed her must be something else, in that large undefined set of factors.
Leila suspects either that Facebook collected contact information from other apps on her phone or that it used location information, noticing that her and her clients’ smartphones were in the same place at the same time.
“We do not use information from third party apps to show friend suggestions in People You May Know,” said a Facebook spokesperson by email. Facebook has said before that it doesn’t use location information for People You May Know, and the spokesperson confirmed that “People You May Know suggestions are not informed by your smartphone’s Location Services.”
So the linkage between Leila and her clients remains a mystery. While the algorithmic black box that is PYMK is simply creepy to most of us, the intrusive network analysis can have serious consequences for people in the sex work and porn industry. One sex toy reviewer devoted a section of her digital security advice to the feature, her cleverest suggestion being to choose a profile photo that doesn’t show your face.
“People think because you have sex on camera, privacy isn’t a big deal for you,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, a California-based advocacy group for adult performers. “But in this industry, privacy is so important. Performers worry about stalkers on a daily basis.”
Stabile says concerns about People You May Know also go the other way, when people’s accounts for their sex work persona are recommended to people they know in their real, vanilla lives like relatives and friends.
That’s what Ela Darling worries about. Darling, who manages virtual reality adult broadcasting at CAM4, has been working in pornography for eight years, but her family members don’t know that.
"I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook.“
“I don’t want my 15-year-old cousin to discover I’m a porn star because my account gets recommended to them on Facebook,” Darling told me by phone.
To combat this, she searches Facebook every few weeks for the last names of her family and extended family to see if any of her relatives have joined the network or created a new account. If they have, she blocks them.
Darling used to have a second, private account under her legal name for connecting with people she knew in her normal, vanilla life, but it was getting recommended to her fans, revealing her “real” identity to them. Some of them began harassing her and trying to track down her family.
“We’re living in an age where you can weaponize personal information against people,” Darling said. She’s not sure how Facebook linked her porn identity to her legal identity, but it meant one had to go. She deleted her private account a few years ago, leaving only her public, porn one.
“Facebook isn’t a luxury,” Darling said. “It’s a utility in our lives. For something that big to be so secretive and powerful in how it accumulates your information is unnerving.”
The outing problem is, like Facebook’s ongoing fake-news scandals, a result of the company’s growth-above-all strategy: First round up as many users as possible, then start cleaning up (or not) the side effects of operating at that scale. People You May Know may be incidental to an individual user’s experience, but it extends the reach and density of the network.
“For sex workers, this is a huge threat. This is life or death for us,” Leila said.
An obvious solution, from a user’s point of view, would be for Facebook to fully explain what data it uses to make friend suggestions, and to allow users to filter it or opt out of the People You May Know feature entirely. That way, someone concerned about having their identity exposed — whether a sex worker, a domestic violence victim, or a political activist — wouldn’t have to worry about having their account shown to someone who shouldn’t see it.
“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful.”
“An opt out is not something we think people would find useful,” said the spokesperson. “For example, even for people who have been on Facebook for a long time and already have lots of friends, most of us like to know when someone we know has joined Facebook for the first time.”
According to the Facebook spokesperson, while there is no way to clearly and directly opt out of the People You May Know feature, there’s an undocumented trick that does enable users to stop appearing in it. It just requires them to shut off their ability to receive any friend requests at all.
“People can always control who can send them friend requests by visiting their account settings,” said the spokesperson. “If they select ‘no one,’ they won’t appear in others’ People You May Know.”
This solution, which is not explained in any of Facebook’s many help pages, would allow Leila to protect herself from exposure, although at the expense of one of Facebook’s basic functions. And it wouldn’t work for Darling as her account exists for fans to find and follow. So the need for a PYMK opt-out remains.
“We take privacy seriously and of course want to make sure people have a safe and positive experience on Facebook,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “For people who choose to maintain a separate identity, we’ve put safeguards in place to help them understand their privacy choices, moderate comments, block people, control location sharing, and report abusive content.”
Facebook also says you can just “x” out anyone who appears in “People You May Know” that you don’t want to know, but sometimes just appearing there means the damage is already done.
As a sex worker, I would just like to add:
If your favorite stripper/escort/cam person etc. personal account is recommended to you over facebook, the best thing you can do is NOT add them, and instead just let them know the next time that you interact with them during an appointment/at the club etc. Please don’t add them so you can try to tell them through their personal account-it’s dangerous, and scary. Block us, don’t look at said accounts, and notify us as soon as you can. Most check for that kinda shit regularly, but a heads up is always nice.
On the reverse, if one of your loved ones sex worker accounts is suggested to you over social media, do not follow it without their permission. Let them know that their account was recommended to you, block them if they ask you too (and/or don’t get offended if they block you), and most importantly do not tell anyone else you/they know. Outting them to other relatives/friends is really dangerous, so please don’t do that.
Civilians (non-sex workers) please reblog!
A couple of things that may be influencing this.
Hopefully these people are using different browsers for their vanilla and sex worker activities. If they aren’t, they should start now. Don’t trust incognito mode.
The next one is harder – the ip address. I know this is one of the factors in PYMK, because when I was on facebook at work, it started recommending co-workers. The problem that the ip address presents is that even if you are using different computers, if you are using the same hardware to connect to the internet, the ip addresses are almost identical, so that can be used to associate your vanilla and sex worker identities (think apartments in a building). I don’t know how to defeat that, short of getting separate ISPs for your different lives.
Having one account that you only use on your computer, through you home internet, and one that you only use on your phone, using your phone’s data, should work as long as you never use you home internet on your phone.
yesterday I was told to shut up about the purging of vulnerable people from society via the “benefits” system in the UK because it “made me sound like I had an axe to grind” against the tory govt, and like.
how can you be so blinkered as to see things like this
and this
and this
and get the takeaway of “well this bitch clearly has an axe to grind” and move on with your life? how can you look anybody in the eye, let alone a blood relation, when you’ve heard the story of state murder and sociopathy, and go “yeah well maybe (the deceased) was the one in the wrong, maybe they too had an axe to grind, maybe fuckin maybe-”?
perhaps it’s easier to think of them as one off cases. as sponging bastards who didn’t cooperate, but they’re not. they’re people close to you, they’re mothers who are so destitute that they die cold and alone, never to see their kids again. even if they didn’t “cooperate”, they don’t deserve death, especially when the system is gamed against them to such an extent that any fury they express can be wielded against them.
the whole fucking point of a benefit system is to be a safety net, yet I’ve grown used to seeing this, of deaths and apathy to the deaths.
i’ve grown used to the crippling panic attacks i’d have about being 3 minutes late to my appointment because of traffic, knowing that it could mean my only means of survival gets cut off.
I risked my life once. I’ve never told anyone about it, but one time when my bus didn’t turn up, I burst into tears in the street. I couldn’t move. It wasn’t within walking distance and I had no money for a cab. a kind man stopped and gave me a lift, but I’d no idea who he was really. I’m well aware that murderers and kidnappers prey on the vulnerable, but in that moment it was a better option than having my bland and insultingly well off “work programme advisor” tell me that he’s very “sorry”, but he can’t register my attendance because I was 30 minutes late and he’s a very busy man.
that’s the scariest thing, what you’re pushed to for what amounts to less than minimum wage.
DPAC and other disabled activists, including Black Triangle co-founder John McArdle, were also furious that the government leaked the UN report to a right-wing tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, and attempted to rubbish its conclusions before it was published the following day.
The report’s findings were rejected by the current government, with little sign of major reform in response that would bolster support for people with disabilities…
[T]he report found that “the threshold of grave or systematic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities has been met in the State party”...
The report found that disabled people’s hardship as a result of the policies resulted in “arrears, debts, evictions” and cuts to essentials such as “housing and food”.
The report also called attention to the scape-goating of people with disabilities who rely on government support, who are regularly portrayed as “lazy”, “committing fraud as benefit claimants” and “putting a burden on taxpayers who are paying ‘money for nothing’”.
“Persons with disabilities continue to experience increasing hostility, aggressive behaviour and sometimes attacks to their personal integrity,” the report said. “The reforms have resulted in people experiencing increasing reliance on family and kinship carers, reduction in their social interaction, increased isolation and, in certain cases, institutionalization.”
Just need to add that the focus of that particular investigation was fairly narrow, confined to changes to the benefits system. The targeted disproportionate effects of ongoing cuts to other public services (including health and social care) weren’t part of the scope there.
I mean, I suppose it’s possible that UN human rights investigators are just hell-bent on demonizing the Tories too. That’s certainly one explanation, however unlikely.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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