Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.
Having said that, I'd argue that X meets the definition of "walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance."
But, it feels like based on this comment, they should still be on X "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. "
And view counts aren't available on most platforms, but on tiktok, where they are, they seem to have about 60k plays or whatever in the past 6 months. So, I'm not sure how you can argue that X is de minimus, but, gotta be on tiktok for reasons, that also apply to X, but, X is de minimus and tiktok is not, even though we get many more views on X.
Anyhow, with this response I've spent 10 more minutes thinking about this than I should, I will leave it here with the closing thought that their post feels very disingenuous.
They do this in almost every tweet.
How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.
One thing that has certainly changed is that algorithms have become more aggressive. If your content isn't performing well, it gets hidden much faster and more aggressively than before. This makes sense when you consider it from the PoV of the platforms (they have much more content to choose from)
The EFF is at odds with both facets of the current US administration as well as the big corporate donors in its pockets and its posts deal with nuanced topics, and so naturally its posts are among those not surfaced as often.
A decade ago they lost the plot. They pulled some bullshit and lied to their entire membership in order to boost their cronies/friends at the Library of Congress. They framed efforts to keep the LoC under loose Congressional/Presidential oversight and free to do as they want as some Anti-Trump fight. Requests about why they would do this went completely unanswered to the membership.
The EFF Board serves their own goals and believe themselves unaccountable to their membership, so they no longer get my money and I no longer entertain or signal boost their message.
Not saying it's working, but I believe something like that is their current design intent of that joke of a massive backwards revolver. The way it currently works is that only those smart enough to bypass the penalization wins.
EFF reps on Twitter probably aren't "smart enough" to game that system, so they stay in the tiny group, and therefore they won't get the views.
Which is fine but just be honest about it.
Anyway,
> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.
Very funny when you think about it, but sad too
These are not serious people.
Even though OP didn’t provide them, I can think of many supporting examples for their assertion that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are either intentionally operating in bad faith, or stupid, or both. So this does not at all meet the definition of ad hominem.
Put another way: “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” is an ad hominem. “You’re wrong, and I think you’re stupid because [reason]” is not. This holds even if the person making the argument does not explicitly give the reason.
You're deliberately overcomplicating things to obfuscate the obvious fallacy.
No, this is a common misconception. Addressing the speaker is part of it but is not sufficient by itself.
People who are quick to claim “ad hominem!” have been getting this wrong basically forever, so please feel free to educate yourself by reading this excellent post: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
“It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments.
Therefore, if you can't demonstrate that your opponent is trying to counter your argument by attacking you, you can't demonstrate that he is resorting to ad hominem.”
You claim about fallacies later, but this is a also a fallacy.
Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.
They said the EFF’s ideology use to be free speech absolutism.
From the EFF post linked to that we are discussing here:
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.
<snip>
neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
<snip>
Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information.
You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community.
That very much makes it sound like the EFF values free speech, but only if that speech is speech they agree with.
What about if your anti-abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. What about if you’re isolated and rely on X to connect with your community?
What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?
The EFF used to be free speech absolutists, it’s evident they be taken over by progressive liberals who favour free speech they agree with.
Look in to the history of cases they have litigated. There’s definitely at least some where I disagreed with the content of the speech, but agreed with the right to say it and that the EFF were correct in supporting the case.
> What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?
People who aren't young, of color, queer, activists, or organizers, use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day, too. There's no good reason for an organization to have a presence on every social media platform under the sun, but there is one for limiting the overhead you have to do (and also for minimizing social media usage in general).
Also, literally nothing about this says anything about other people's speech. Them deciding not to use twitter doesn't mean you can't, obviously.
I feel like everyone is losing the plot a bit. Are we understanding the words we're saying before we choose to say them?
(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)
And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.
No, the relevant questions for the EFF are the ones that the EFF put into their blog post to explain why they're not on X despite remaining on e.g. Facebook, which may or may not be the same as this tweet (I don't read tweets but did read the blog post): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
Nikita says they were "never" deboosted, but Musk said they were going to do that and it was a huge topic...?
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2041911302541730237?s=20
He says here about an interface change. I've noticed this change. The sites are opening in a kind of sub window with the feedback UI still visible. I found this annoying but now I see the point.
What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.
They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is ideological!
It would be dishonest of them to pretend they were not ideological. Staying on Twitter was likely worse for their mission then leaving it.
I think that says it all.
If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.
It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.
Also, I don’t think the kind of engagement X’s algorithms reward would be good for the EFF’s image as a serious organization.
Huh wow, that almost sounds like the interactions on X are low quality and not worth replying to. I can't tell because I don't have an X account and you can't view replies without one anymore, but every time I have seen the replies to posts on X they're always flooded with hate, bots, and scams. Seems like a good reason to leave.
Both Bluesky and Mastodon are open/federated networks, which aligns more with EFF's values. So, yes, but I don't think for the reasons you're hinting at.
Let's be honest and look at the engagement numbers of the post announcing this:
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
These numbers, combined with the facts that Mastodon and BlueSky are aligned with internet freedoms while X is strongly aligned against internet freedoms, make for a clear-and-cut case that it's past time to leave the platform.
You can find links to other criticisms of twitter in TFA:
Interop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera...
Privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/twitter-removes-privac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/twitter-and-others-dou...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...
Accountability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/twitter-axes-accountab...
DM encryption: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/after-weeks-hack-it-pa...
Twitter is un-aligned with their goals, and has dismal reach. Facebook and instagram are unaligned with their goals and are how they reach a lot of new people.
Not super complicated, tho if i am reading between the lines - calling out the numbers feels like a call to action for other orgs. Suggesting they run their own numbers, and get off twitter.
They would not be able to enforce it on desktop computers, short of banning every user one-at-a-time, but they can easily blanket-ban it on mobile phones by requesting Apple and Google remove unauthorized third-party clients from their app stores. (Which they will do. Apple even lists unauthorized clients for services controlled by other parties as against the rules. Whatever that means.)
Maybe I need to re-evaluate some of the youtube people that I stopped watching because they were so carefully neutral, not wanting to offend the nazis, I thought. Perhaps that's just american culture to try to avoid politics at all cost and I shouldn't view it like they sympathize with that camp?
(To provide context, I'm from the Netherlands. I know we sit, ehm, 'far right' on the honesty spectrum but I hadn't the impression that American culture was very different in that regard, at least if you adjust the scales of pleasantries and exuberism to our usual range, which this EFF post has none of)
Edit: what u/ceejayoz said downthread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706961> could be the answer: it is about the numbers, but you have to offset them for how many other people think you're an ass for being there. Nobody thinks you're an ass if you're on Mastodon, you're just posting to whatever server you think fits your niche best, so even if that were only a few thousand views per post then that math might work out to better publicity than ten times as many views and hanging out on X.com
- Greater user control how is any of the other platforms they have no problem with any different than twitter?
- Real security improvements where is end to end encryption on all the other social media? And why do they need end to end encryption to broadcast a message to the public?
- Transparent content moderation wait, the EFF is now calling for more censorship?
The first two points are clearly nonsensical, only the third one has at least some logic. Though if the EFF has turned pro-censorship, I am having bad feeling for having given them money in the past.
“Ideological” in this context is what you say when you’re trying to deny that there’s moral dimension to the issue. Which you absolutely are.
Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.
You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites:
> people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day
Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.
Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.
I don’t know literally anyone using twitter and yet obviously people do.
Perhaps what the individuals we know are doing are in fact reflective of not very much.
Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.
That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression
And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.
Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.
So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.
[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.
and you didn't call every tech CEO a fascist but you did call them all censorious tyrants who operate against liberal ideals. which is a fun thing to say on a website where you're freely saying it. if the tyrants are this bad at tyranny maybe they're not actually tyrants.
> The Numbers Aren't Working Out
I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
Yes.
> If they got few impressions what does it matter?
Because, it was costing a lot of money or resources to stay on X. Kind of an odd follow up to your previous question.
> You can write the content once.
Pretty sure they know how to write content considering we are reading it.
“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Apparently X.com doesn’t fit in that world anymore.
You can't just ignore complete sentences because it hurts your narrative.
"They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they agree with."
Why would you say that? That's a lie?
Oh wait... it sucks when people just remove important parts of what you say. Don't lie. It's not good.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]
I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
[1] https://www.thebulwark.com/p/yes-elon-musk-vote-buying-is-ag...
[2] https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffre...
Discuss any of these on Twitter would get you banned, until Musk took over. It still does on many left leaning platforms, including Youtube, Twitch, BlueSky, etc.
HN is the only platform I've participated in that tends to allow opposing view points (albeit more left leaning).
If EFF wants to declare that it's now a Left leaning activist entity and doesn't like to engage wit other people, that's fine, I'd rather they just say that instead and be honest.
The problem is online/MAGA conservatives don't want to discuss those things. I've never talked to any online conservative who had anything new or interesting to say about any of those things.
More to the point you just claimed discussion of these matters wasn’t ever suppressed and then attempted to suppress discussion of them by claiming this was bigoted.
Regarding government censorship, Twitter's pre-Musk transparency reports consistently showed them complying with roughly half of government takedown requests, and they frequently fought overly broad demands in court. Under Musk, data compiled by Rest of World showed that compliance jumped to over 80% (specifically 83% in his first six months), heavily favoring takedown requests from authoritarian-leaning governments.
On the topic of algorithmic amplification, y'all argue about whether boosting one side equals censoring the other. Setting the semantics aside, a 2023 Nature study found that X's "For You" algorithm demonstrably amplifies conservative content and steers users toward conservative accounts at a much higher rate than a chronological feed, while actively demoting traditional media.
As for moderation and toxicity, the claim that discussing certain topics would automatically get you banned usually ignored that it was generally the manner of the discussion (ie targeted harassment) rather than the topics themselves that triggered enforcement pre-Musk. Post-acquisition, a 2025 PLOS One audit found that measurable hate speech increased by roughly 50%, alongside a significant spike in user engagement with that specific content.
Finally, there's the issue of transparency itself. We used to get highly detailed, bi-annual reports that tracked exact volumes of rule enforcement. Those were abruptly paused, and the reports that eventually resumed are heavily stripped down, omitting comprehensive metrics on things like spam and platform manipulation.
TL;DR: The data suggests that while you are less likely to get banned by US-centric moderation for controversial cultural takes, the platform is demonstrably more compliant with state-sponsored censorship, less transparent about its operations, and algorithmically tuned to amplify right-leaning content.
What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.
Because what I read is that their X posts are getting only 3% of the engagement compared to pre-Musk Twitter.
The post insinuates that's because the platform intentionally down-ranks posts for ideological purposes.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
Is that correct?
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
This part is too broad.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.
People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.
It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.
A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.
Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.
Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.
By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.
The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.
You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.
Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.
Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.
By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly
It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.
Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
Insufferable.
I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!
But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.
I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.
And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
Assuming that Twitter's user count has remained relatively steady (within 100% either way), the only thing that could explain a huge drop in views would be a change to their opaque algorithm.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
Twitter's user count has trended upward for the last 10 years: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
Therefore, Twitter must be downranking or silencing the EFF's account. Unless you have a better explanation?
> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.
Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.
The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.
If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.
I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.
That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.
Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.
> Leftists
Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.
The fewer legitimate organizations posting on twitter, drawing eyes and views to the site, the better.
This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.
If you want to give EFF more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
and
> Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.
On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.
If they want to make some principled stand against toxic social media, then have at it. This is pure pandering to a very specific group.
What ideological concerns are they focused on? Imo wanting digital privacy has always been ideological, and to the extent it has ever been part of a culture war they seem to have lost that war.
At most, X only serves as a marketing/fundraising mechanism. Nothing more. And the EFF doesn't really need to do that as I'm certain their victories and fights will still be shared on X without them.
Huh? This sounds like you mean before elon "free speech!" musk but I can only imagine that, if it ever was a thing, it was a thing after. At some point a competitor's links were being blocked, a little 'oops'ie with 'the algorithm' of course. Facebook also pulled some of those over the years. I don't know about outright bans though, especially concerning Twitter before Musk
> "We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter," the company said in a statement.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/twitter-bans-linking-to...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/twitter-ban-soci...
that's precisely what I assumed
Genuinely thanks for doing the effort of looking for sources and correcting someone you thought was wrong, but the allegation of me singlehandedly (just the thought! :D) trying to rewrite history maybe goes a bit far when I said it was just my assumption and that I don't know of such a thing before elonmusk took over
Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...
Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok
They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain:
> The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.
None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X.
> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day
I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well.
It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?
That's easy to sustain.
Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
>We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.
They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time.
Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.
It's even more likely that Twitter's audience in 2018 was fairly supportive of the EFF's goals, but X's audience in 2026 is either indifferent or hostile.
As they put it:
> X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
More “X is simply not worth our time anymore”. I can’t say with any certainty that X is on a death spiral (personally it does feel that way), but the kind of crowd who have remained in spite of Musk’s many public embarrassments (and the handling of Grok deep fakes and women) probably aren’t the kind who are passionate about the EFF
The problem for the EFF is that they don't have anywhere else to go with nearly the reach of Twitter. Bluesky has only 15 million monthly active users. They could pin their hopes on Facebook, but it's hard to think of a criticism of Twitter that wouldn't apply to Facebook.
Basically the problem for EFF and a lot of the progressive activist orgs out there is that they want a mass global audience but a platform with progressive activist moderation, and that was possible in the heyday of the Biden Administration, but starting with Musk's purchase of Twitter and firing of much of the progressive activist staff, together with the loss in the Missouri vs Biden consent decree, it's getting harder to find a truly mass audience social media platform that is willing to enforce progressive activist social norms.
As this realization sinks in, we are seeing organization after organization rage quit the mass market platforms and join more niche platforms that is moderated to their niche taste (e.g. mastodon, bluesky, etc), and this is just one example of that. The EFF of old would never have seen this as a problem, but for the present day EFF it's a big problem.
Another option is a medium without engagement at all. You post your stuff and that's it, for example you can quote/amplify but not comment. No zingers, mocking quote tweets, no clapbacks, etc. I think an organization like the EFF could tolerate that, they want a pure write-only medium where you make a PR announcement that gets lot of attention but is not subject to any disparagement.
Big orgs would love a system like that, but I'm not convinced it could draw a lot of eyeballs.
I don't know the numbers for EFF, but having 400K followers on X and getting between zero and five comments per post if you go back a couple of weeks (to skip today's fire), between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform. They get better numbers from Facebook, a dying platform, with half the followers. They get similar or better numbers from Instagram with less than 10% of the followers they have in Twitter.
Or they're tweeting something their followers don't care enough about to engage with, so the platform stops funneling their post to other followers.
Again, youtubers complain about this same kind of thing regularly. It's almost always just a 'you' problem, your content is simply not engaging.
> We called for:
> - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles
> - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages
> - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability.
Of course not.
And yet they leave X and only X.
Twitter account bans had always been so broken that account bans, account ban evasions, tweet deboosting avoidance, etc. has all, long, been natural parts of life on it, since at least 2010s. I might as well argue that it would not have gone so far "down", psychologically, to the point that its old management would have sold the entire thing to Musk and for people to genuinely believe in positive outcome under him.
The very least you guys could have done it is to recognize the fact that inconsistent, unclear, unenforced policies of old Twitter existed && are not consistent with yours. You guys don't even do that. How even.
1. These are not reasons they listed for leaving X. These are lists of problems they identified on Twitter. They did not leave until 2026.
2. Yes, you get better transparency with Mastodons, owing to the fact Mastodons are usually operated and moderated by people with an interest in transparency. BlueSky moderation is also done more transparently (see its labeling system) and in ways that are less absolute (see BlackSky, etc).
3. Yes, you get better user control with Mastodons and BlueSkys. There are third party apps which work well, owing to them having open APIs. BlueSky - Mastodon bridges are common.
4. It's not "only X". EFF hasn't posted to identi.ca in 13 years, Flickr in one year, or comp.org.eff.news since 2000.
The only social media I’m going to keep for now is Reddit and YouTube because I think it’s still a net positive for the educational content, but even those are on the chopping block for me. The whole Internet is being capitalized into junk food, people just push out sensationalized low calorie garbage because they get paid per view. It’s sad to see.
AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
> EFF has changed
> EFF was fairly neutral ... Last year, they began ... I saw them becoming more and more partisan
I mean, I read that as a shift.
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.
With every other platform, it's hidden away behind the scenes, but there's surely powerful individuals making the big decisions about what to promote and what to suppress.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/activists-sue-san-francis... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-activists-demonstrate... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-alert-eff-argues-ag... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/trumps-blocking-people-hi... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/comprehensive-legal-refor...
What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right.
What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.
> Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over?
That’s like asking “would activists fight for your rights if no one was violating them”. I mean, no, but that doesn’t say anything. Had Twitter not have been sold but they eventually did the same things Elon did, then the EFF would probably have left just the same. Had Elon taken over but not done what he did, they probably wouldn’t have. The EFF is not on a personal vendetta, this is about the service as it is right now.
Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.
That is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.
"but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. "
This is saying that they strayed from their original mission. They were focused on a narrow set of beliefs before, and then it changed to focusing on unrelated and more partisan politics.
And yes this was pretty easy to understand.
An interesting thing about this era is that things which were bipartisan in the 2000s are now seen as partisan. Some examples of things that I remember as bipartisan in the 2000s which are now seen as left-leaning ideas: NATO membership, suffrage for women, freedom from state religion, the Forestry Service, national parks.
Things are changing.
I'm on Twitter/X, but none of the other social media sites they list (I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, but not in any sort of regular way). So their reach to me personally is diminished. Obviously I'll still go on their website if I want to keep up with their activities and I'll probably still hear relevant news about them though.
That being said, there is no disguise.
If you don't that is fine but I imagine you would also hold the view that not posting on X shouldn't be controversial then either.
I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
When you say "Be real", you're pleading with people to take your statement more seriously. But it's simply the case that people have very strong and negative opinions about nazis and child pornography.
They said nothing of this in TFA, all they talked about was decimated view count. The obvious conclusion is X is censoring them, like they pretty much do to anybody that Elon feels like censoring.
But i would bet social media managers use similar tools, and the fact that no one can access twitter API might add just the little bit of friction you want to avoid.
If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.
It's an analogy. You'll find plenty of neo-Nazis and bigots of all kinds in the replies of any political post, posting away happily to their echo chamber.
So we know why they did it. They wanted to take a stance against X. They just didn't have the balls to say it out loud or the dignity to leave quietly.
what tradeoff?
What cost is there to post on X at the same time as the other platforms? Zero. It’s not like they need to moderate forums.
We all know what the people defending this are doing it for and EFF barely plays into it at all. This is Musk Man Bad, nothing more.
It's clear this is about politics, and I'm not opposed to that, Elon is not awesome, but trying to justify it otherwise seems kind of shady.
Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.
Yes. If.
I think you just need to accept that clearly the EFF is not getting engagement on Twitter anymore - either because the academic and professional crowd has largely left for better moderated, more interesting spaces (like I and most of my friends did). Or because they are being downranked by the algorithm.
In either case, they're making this decision based on data that they have, clearly the tiny amount of traffic from Twitter is not worth the effort and reputational harm that comes from staying on the platform.
And if it costed as much as posting on X, they should.
>In either case, they're making this decision based on data that they have
And people take issue precisely with that not making any sense, which leads people to look at stuff like
>clearly the tiny amount of traffic from Twitter is not worth the effort and reputational harm that comes from staying on the platform.
By which I mean "stuff like that statement". Not that they ACTUALLY face any reputational harm (a ludicrous assertion) but that the politics high above have shifted in such a way that they'd agree with something like that.
This betrays their mission and paints a bad picture of their future, which ironically, does incur in reputational harm.
The valuable discussions aren't the same as the hype machine.
For what good it does, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook aren't that yet (the Metaverse might have been borderline though, haha)
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
Don't get me started on tiktok...
Honestly with "AI" helping a lot of the boring configuration tedium, I feel like I might finally reach the stage where I like my desktop environment config.
Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments.
I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.
For example, just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by a revanchists regime declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders. It would be ridiculous (and depressingly realistic) for some critics to say: "They don't really want peace, or else they would be a nation of pacifists who would let themselves get annexed right now without bloodshed.)
PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
So I feared for Sambo when he encountered the tigers. I was elated when he eluded them by first racing around the tree and then climbing it. I was mystified how tigers running round and round a tree could turn to butter (but set that aside so I could continue the story and reduce my fearful suspense). I was relieved to see that Sambo was safe. I identified with Sambo (although I am neither black or brown).
Hoorah for the fantastic tales from many lands that filled my childhood and those of my brothers and sisters with wonder!
I am still a child when I read fairy tales and fables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
But walking into a Sambo’s meant being immersed in the visual world, which was loaded with racist tropes. Sambo was depicted as a foolish child with dark skin and either a giant grin or eye-popping fear.
Again, I was a kid in the 1970s and I knew it was racist.
"If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Yes? If you go to the southern part of the United States, there are many restaurants with Confederate memorabilia and Confederate flags on the back of truck windows.
Some trucks even have hairy testicles hanging off the hitch haha!
I find the idea of venerating an ideology that held that it was ok to hold human beings in bondage from the moment of their birth to their death to be abhorrent.
That is the beauty of freedom. You make the choice.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.
Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.
I don’t expect them to provide a platform for people who make it a point to hate others and advocate for removal of their / my rights and so on.
This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions.
It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]
Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.
[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...
Regarding your later edit:
> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
For example, I do not feel comfortable using the same platform as people that post child sexual abuse material. X's Grok is infamous for generating such content on demand. I opt to use platforms that do not have this as a first-class feature. X has selected against my participation and for the participations of people who hold a contrary opinion to me. Even if Grok stops producing CSAM, that selection bias will persist.
how is that not "producing content"?
And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.
Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1].
That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman.
>Seems to me that this is what has changed.
It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts.
The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category.
Enjoy.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist vs making a Nazi salute on live television). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.
As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), most of them preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.
Also, there were always some people of influence that held extreme views. But such people behaving in an uncivilised manner in public was less common (and certainly less accepted).
Notwithstanding the above, given how powerful network effects are in social media, I think boycotting platforms operated by people like Musk (I struggle to find the words to fully encompass how repulsive he has become) is arguably one of the more effective forms of protest available to people, and I encourage them to exercise it.
If you were not aware of it, it is not because it wasn't happening. Historically, excepting media companies, left leaning companies have always been outspoken about this while right leaning ones believed in the idea of focusing on business and avoiding overt political messaging.
So companies like Exxon were not broadcasting their views but were still lobbying government directly to change the laws in a way that benefit them (see deregulation).
Elon Musk will always be just a Giant, Nazi-aligned, Dildo on my scorecard.
Obviously that doesn't matter to anyone. But it matters to me.
That ... does not hold at all. You wouldn't buy or subscribe to an openly Nazi paper unless you are a full blown white supremacist.
People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.
Elon's behavior is truly disgraceful, but spouting dumb shit is not "beyond politics".
There are many political opinions that I strongly believe in that I am comfortable disagreeing with people on. I believe everyone has a right to health care, and that society should guarantee basic necessities for everyone. I even feel that belief is a morality based belief. However, I can accept people disagreeing with me, and can accept that there are some strong arguments against my belief, and that good people can disagree with my position.
On the other hand, if someone believes that certain races should not have the same rights, or that women should be given less agency than men, I will not entertain that argument or accept that it is just a political dispute. That is a fundamental moral issue, and is beyond JUST politics.
That was changed.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/10/01/Coeur-dAlene-bombing...
I specifically remember my dad talking to his parents about that one on the phone and being scared for them.
Like my other comment below though, part of the reason they resorted to violence is because at that time, they had no hope of participating in mainstream, electoral politics.
The entire point is to invite/allow otherwise “good” people to be able to think it’s not entirely serious, and that caring is pearl-clutching and is lame.
That way they can vote for their tax cuts, wear their “team” colors, and keep voting for “their” party.
It happens with successful sports teams all the time. Tiger Woods just got in his fourth (likely under the influence) car wreck, and sports media is already making excuses or talking about how hard he must have it. It’s the same process.
At its core, there's nothing wrong with conservatism. Wanting to preserve traditional cultural and social values; the nuclear family with a father and mother figure; theology as the moral backbone—all of these are reasonable ideas. But somewhere along the way this got associated with xenophobia, racism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and all kinds of evil shit, which goes against even the teachings of their holy scriptures. How people can hold these conflicting viewpoints is beyond me. Either they're using this ideology as an excuse for their heinous thoughts and behavior, or they're intellectually incapable of introspection and critical thinking. Maybe both.
I'm moderately left leaning, and the extreme left has also undoubtedly lost the plot, but at least that side espouses tolerance, humanism, and some ideas that I find appealing but don't consider essential to humanity, such as secularism, skepticism, liberalism, etc. There are objectionable ideas on the left as well, but these are often a reaction to the intolerance of the other side, and rarely a product of the ideology itself. I do think this is needed to a certain extent, as complete tolerance is a weakness that opportunistic people will exploit (paradox of tolerance).
So to me it's clear that one side is on the right side of history, and the other one isn't. One is trying to move us towards a better future and well-being for everyone, while the other is sabotaging this to destroy and hoard riches for a few.
I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al, are able to not only be successful, but to accumulate unimaginable wealth and power. It's not only that I disagree with their politics. It's that I'm baffled by the fact that we put people like this in power, and that the majority are unable to see the harm they're doing to the world, only so that they can enrich themselves and their very close inner circle. These are signs that humanity is still held back by some deeply rooted social traits which I'm not sure we'll be able to overcome before it's too late. Part of me is also disturbed by the negative role technology is playing in all of this, yet we're all entranced by its appeal to do anything about it.
> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.
Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)
I am sure you put these people in the same basket by no logical reason, as they are very different and the reason behind each of them is very different. As an Eastern European I understand a bit more Orban and Putin, I don't have to agree with them to understand how things work, and they the 3 have almost nothing in common but being targeted by the political left as the enemy.
Come on, you know what they mean. They're authoritarian populist leaders with a disregard for the rule of law. Cruel men that rejoice in the "destruction" of their political enemies both figuratively and literally. Men with little emotional control that suffer from severe anxiety at anything that doesn't fit their very narrow view of the world.
Conservatives are a minority because we live in an unequal society, so necessarily the people benefiting and wanting that to continue are that same minority. There are a relatively small number of people that are confused about their class position or are aspirational and confuse their current position with actually achieving a social leap.
Of course, then there are personality types that metabolize this in different ways, but the basis of politics is materialism. A lot of money and words are deployed to obscure this, which has been known for over a hundred years. I was reading Thucydides (440 BCE) and in the first few pages he grounds significant political events in materialist forces.
It depends: if you support far right viewpoints, like wanting to deport minorities, the MSM will cover it as just politics. If you support far left (for America) viewpoints, like, wanting free healthcare, the MSM will cover it as if you're a radical communist.
To most people “I want to deport minorities” would imply nothing about citizenship status.
Someone with the opposite opinion would frame it as “open borders”, which is an extremist viewpoint globally and also not what people on the left in the US are advocating for.
Media coverage in the US is partisan. This is not an insightful viewpoint or nearly as incendiary as you’re making it out to be.
It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment, you are making it sound like he is going around doing it all the time. He's a bit of an eccentric, I genuinely believe he wasn't intending on it coming off like that.
> "white homeland"
Where is this quote available?
He was quite self aware of what he did. He immediately followed it up by visiting a rally for the far right in Germany.
I left Twitter, Facebook, et al about a decade ago. And I can assure you: You will never miss any important development.
The notion that we need to plugged into Twitter, X, whatever, to stay up to date is simply false.
Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
Correct me if I'm wrong: I'm asserting that having a principle is an inalienable belief that actually guides behavior, not selectively applies to behavior.
Though generally: yes, I agree: get off twitter, and I'd go a step further and say..minimize all social media involvement.
I don't mean that in a fully negative way, since belief and choices are rarely atomic.
Take, for example, someone who believes animals shouldn't suffer unnecessarily. That can manifest anywhere from veganism to just avoiding factory farmed meat. I wouldn't point at any one position on that spectrum and say they don't believe their own stated principle, but I would say that some have weaker convictions than others.
I agree with your assertion regarding the degree to which a principle guides behavior. And id probably walk back my original position somewhat, because having a principle and adhering to it absolutely and fanatically is untenable at most and inconvenient at least.
Still, I'd argue there's value in a human engaging in some sort of periodic "principles audit" to take stock of their past behaviors/actions and recalibrate future behavior.
Then again, I'm an optimist....
I do agree with this. I would call it "introspection" and a healthy person should be fairly introspective in general, either taking dedicated time to consider their actions and beliefs, or continually keeping them in mind when making decisions.
I'm more astounded that people think every single part of it is a cesspool when in reality there are gems to be found that aren't in any other X alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon or (lol) Threads.
The net result is that X shows breaking news, in the same way that the (infamous) meme of bullet holes marked on the WWII plane only shows part of the story - the people who have departed the platform aren't posting, and thus X is only breaking news from a subset of people.
This might be fine for certain types of topics. For understanding the zeitgeist on culture and politics, though, you can't filter your way towards hearing from voices that are no longer posting at all.
And those voices may be unequally represented in X for similar reasons - perhaps (somewhat) uncorrelated from politics, but simply due to the UX consequences of prioritizing commenters willing to pay the platform.
All six of the speakers immediately said Twitter was realistically the only place you can keep up with the conversation. Having an extensively curated list means that anytime anything breaks (and often a few hours before) you are going to hear about it on X/Twitter.
I would love to know if there is anything even close to the reach of X. It has a lot of problems - but if you want to track breaking news, I can't think of anything else close to it.
There's A LOT more tech stuff than people realize but the anti-AI crowd on that site is nuts.
Interesting take. I'm not aware that anyone is doing vote rings or vote buying very successfully (considering that my own blog also makes it at an expected rate, and I know there isn't a group of friends voting that up) but I kinda assume that this is a thing for some of the bigger launches where they are hoping for conversions. Beyond a defined group coordinating their posts or votes, though, surely HN's front page can't be seen as vetted beyond "oh this looks trendy/hype"? People don't vote only after trying out the product or reading the full article. In many cases that would mean voting after it has already disappeared off of the front page for good
This is key.
And all the commentary here is negative, skeptical and mean. It’s like Slashdot when Apple started ascending and everyone was complaining that iPods will never catch on.
Unless you're curbstomping AI for being "slop", you'll get an instant deluge of downvotes.
FSM help you if you post something positive =)
Ramen
Seriously, if you're working on anything worthwhile, you can wait for the weekly digest. Everything else just seems like hyperiding.
HN is a nice consolidated view - and I pull up the home page 2-3 times a day (and have done so for 10+ years every day) - but, there is a firehose of information coming in on X - particularly if you have a very highly curated list - and some people are insanely high signal - Karpathy for instances always seems to zoom in on important things.
That's literally just gossip. The same dynamic existed with episodes of Friends and Game of Thrones.
Everyone gathers around the water-cooler and discusses the newest happenings, but that's not science and it's not engineering. You're not passing around serious white papers and looking over peer reviewed publications and datasets, it's just... gossip. It has the same value as gossip and is completely optional.
> by lunch it's kind of old news
It's hype.
This is just busy work chasing nothing but vanity.
Like asking heroin addicts what heroin they prefer. What an utter waste time.
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
Reminds me of Christians and free will.
Leading with the supposed "nazi salute" really detracts from the other, much more legitimate and substantive issues you raised.
He grew up in apartheid South Africa, where his grandparents moved because they wanted to support apartheid. His grandparents were nazis; as in Errol Musk has stated they were in the "German [Nazi] Party but in Canada", and supported Hitler in the 1940s. Elon would have picked up on these influences, and Elon himself has supported AFD, the current german nazi party. By all accounts, it's not out of character for Elon to heil. I mean, if we for some reason are discounting the obvious visual evidence that he did, in fact, heil.
Pleas explain to me how that wasn't a nazi salute.
>Elon himself has supported AFD, the current german nazi part
No, the current nazi party is Die Heimat (or whatever they call themselves). AFD just wants common sense immigration reform.
Also the absolute height of stupidity to conclude he didn't do it despite quite literally having to take a tour of Auschwitz because he wasn't stopping the Nazis on his site.
Add to that the dozens of times we've learned about US Republicans praising Hitler and Elon quite literally being the biggest donor.
You're not a serious person.
lol https://www.axios.com/2025/01/23/elon-musk-nazi-joke-adl
If anything you're not the serious person here.
Here you go:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-...
and another:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/florida-inte...
He shard a video of a podcaster arguing Hitler had no desire to exterminate Jews and the Holocaust deaths were logistical failures.
His comments in Germany about too much past guilt.
The never-ending stream of tweets about white solidarity.
Restored white supremist accounts on X.
You're the new flat earther movement.
>He shard a video of a podcaster arguing Hitler had no desire to exterminate Jews and the Holocaust deaths were logistical failures.
The episode covered a lot of material that had nothing to do with WW2 or the Holocaust and Elon never endorsed any particular claims in it. In any case, Elon took down the post and put up a community note debunking Cooper's argument after people pointed it out.
You can find the episode here: https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-darryl-cooper
>His comments in Germany about too much past guilt.
I agree with it. Why should people people feel guilty for the actions of others? It serves no purpose other than to further mass immigration. Elon Musk wants to end mass immigration into western countries which is why he supports right wing political parties in Europe and America. That doesn't make him or those political parties "nazi". You can oppose mass immigration without being a nazi.
> Everybody involved in that story was condemned by mainstream Republicans.
lol huh?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/first-thing-...
> In any case, Elon took down the post and put up a community note debunking Cooper's argument after people pointed it out.
Ahh yes, the genius billionaire who doesn't understand basic English. That just coincidentally didn't realize he was platforming Nazis. That continues to spread racist bullshit on his X account.
> Why should people people feel guilty for the actions of others?
My point exactly. You're a child.
You're the new flat earthers.
ADL is not concerned with anti-semitism anymore, they'renonly concerned about silencing xriticism of Israel. This became clear when they updated their definition of anti-semitism to include anti-zionism and opposition to Israel. They have lost all credibility.
And AFD is most definitely a nazi party. Just because there are less polished nazi parties as well does not make them non-nazis. They have an ethnonationalist agenda, focusing on German ethnicity as the basis around which to build the German nation state. Contrast this with civic nationalism, the non-nazi liberal take on nation states, in which citizenship is based on a cultural identity and belonging, not your Germanic descent.
>And AFD is most definitely a nazi party. Just because there are less polished nazi parties as well does not make them non-nazis. They have an ethnonationalist agenda, focusing on German ethnicity as the basis around which to build the German nation state. Contrast this with civic nationalism, the non-nazi liberal take on nation states, in which citizenship is based on a cultural identity and belonging, not your Germanic descent.
The AFD is actually rather moderate. They want mass deportations for unassimilated migrants, i.e. people who don't speak German, don't work, commit crimes, etc. What's actually radical is the idea that you can import those with no connection to Europe and suddenly they are just as European as anyone else because you gave them citizenship.
Indeed, wish we could do the same with insular Jewish communities in the northeastern US that siphon off welfare while running fraudulent charities that are basically a way to siphon money from unexpected natives across the country.
And on a rational note, you're just writing up an army of strawmen to dunk on, and your arguments are not answering mine, they're nothing but rhetoric.
I don't think I can convince you. I hope some day you realize you're on the wrong side of history.
Or maybe you could just take off the mask fully and admit you're a racist. That would be preferable to this pathetic "centrist" roleplay.
I <3 israel
But yes, we can agree that it's not his worse sin. Just adds to a long list.
I still can't believe we're doing this. Even after Elon has allowed X to devolve into a cesspit of Nazis. Even though he had to take a tour of Auschwitz because of his insensitivity to it. Even though he's the biggest donor to a party that cant stop idolizing Hitler in group chats that leaked, even though he wont stop talking about the destruction of the white race, even though he wont stop race-baiting himself, even after all that and a handful of other things youre totally convinced he didn't do a Nazi salute.
edit: The degree to which people are dishonest or just unbelievably gullible is pretty astonishing. It's like arguing wtih flat earthers.
Probably the least impactful factor for most users.
Unfortunately, independent of the politics, Musk destroyed X with many many odd decisions. Rebranding from Twitter to X is one of the top ones.
reddit is #4, NYT is #11, Fox is #16, AP is #18, CNN is #21.
The rational question isn't "Why is anyone still using it?", it's "Why aren't you?"
The answer would appear to be emotional/ideological on your part, which is fine, but not very honest to express like this.
Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
What was wrong with just saying people instead of this nonsense? EFF has been a joke for a while now so has every organization that does something for people. It's just a box that can be ticked when someone asks something stupid like "who protects some imaginary rights".
For EFF: That's ~15 years too late, and way too specific. Their job (without them ever having realized in fact) was to generate some force against these centralized commercial walled gardens, where we have our public discourse, with some opaque algorithms deciding what goes up and what goes down.
Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.
But that is actually what they called out: they're not getting eyes anymore. Views at X have cratered so hard that it's barely worth the time.
It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
> It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
which to me, it's better to spew a message out into the ether with the chance that someone might happen upon it rather than close things off entirely.
All they would need to do is set up some cross-posting pipeline and the work would be pretty much zero.
They could even drive people to click on mastodon/bsky links this way if they wanted people to go to the decentralized web.
This take is not valid.
So pretty much all major sites except X. They are saying LinkedIn is more important to reach people than X, really?
But as they say in the article, their reason for leaving isn't solely the low impressions. It's the low impressions, plus "Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes," plus X's unwillingness to give users more control, consider end-to-end DM encryption, or offer transparent moderation.
So yeah they’re absolutely right to get the fuck out of the place he destroyed.
Musk fired 90+% of Twitter, not just the human rights team.
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
There's more ROI posting on BlueSky or Mastodon, even ignoring the fact that BlueSky and Mastodon are projects clearly more aligned with internet freedom than X is.
(edited for clarity)
Geeks and weirdos donate to EFF. :)
Its not political to prefer open systems.
If you actually care about getting your point across, hostile environments are exactly the place that you need to be broadcasting. Especially when they haven't put up any barriers for you.
EFF leadership just totally doesn't get it.
Unless the goal isn't what they say it is and they just need the cheerleading squad to make it look like their fundraising is effective.
Source: I've argued with strangers on the internet since the mid-90's.
Don't feed the trolls was the rule back then when trolls were just actual people arguing for the sake of getting a reaction - and now the trolls are either a piece of software connected to a language model or paid to argue in bad faith. Like WOPR says: the only winning move is not to play.
The general sentiment people observe online definitely changes how they think, it moves the Overton Window considerably. And that's exactly what the bots[0] on Twitter and other platforms like TikTok do, they argue about whatever they get paid to argue for in bad faith, endlessly.
People see this, not knowing it's all artificial, and go "ooh, MANY PEOPLE think like this" and start thinking it's normal to think like that.
[0] I'm using "bot" as shorthand here for bad faith actors, usually the first level is just spamming static canned arguments, stage two is some kind of smart system that responds to the replies somewhat in context and stage three will ping an actual human who will come in with VERY specific deep-cut arguments.
Source: I argue online a lot for fun and relaxation.
I personally don't care if EFF leaves X. However the message in the article does not line up, it's a bad decision and not justified by the reasons cited.
Your post made me randomly spot check another one from a month ago ("The U.S. government on Wednesday..."), the numbers aren't quite as drastic but X is still ahead. Likes/comment shares:
X: 280, 4, 172.
Bluesky: 182, 2, 98.
Because of the algorithms I wouldn't be surprised if you'd be able to cherry pick some Bluesky post that's ahead. But a casual browse through both feeds makes it look like X gets much more engagement.
Yes, it’s your inability to do even the most basic verification of the data underlying your understanding before making claims.
Probably the reason EFF keeps using mastodon/bluesky is not for reach, but to support federated platforms.
As an activist organization EFF needs reach people, but also it needs to show people alternatives to surveillance capitalism exist and encourage their use.
I find it really hard to believe that even with lower views on X than the past, that it's literally not worth the tiny about of effort to get their messages posted there.
X: 1,500 likes, 50 comments, 846 shares.
Facebook: 58 likes, 8 comments, 22 shares.
Bluesky: 94 likes, 3 comments, 51 shares.
No and no obviously, they dont target some desperate addicted teens
Like I don't care about stars at all as a consumer as a developer nor as a repository owner.
GH stars can indicate: which of many forks of a repo might be the most active, which of many projects in a category might be the most used/trusted, the growth trajectory of a projects (stars over time).
Even if you assumed there isn't some Elon "like multiplier" being applied to these numbers, the amount of bot activity on X is staggering.
You have no idea how many humans are being reached without metrics about links being followed.
One can't justify quitting because the number is falling, and claims the number does not matter at the same time. or can it?
Seems clear while their reach has decreased over time, it's still the highest on X.
I do agree with the decision, but declining reach is not the primary reason, it is merely what got them over the line.
You think those people are on X?
This is not true at all, and it's a silly statement. X isn't mainstream anymore, and the people who think it is are simply stuck in a bubble. I suspect you might be one of the "terminally online people" you're denigrating as not "regular people".
X's MAU is in the ballpark as Quora or Pinterest. "Pinterest gets you more eyes than any alternative social media" is a more defensible statement.
It's not even in the top 10. It's not 2010 any more, people are on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
If you read the rest of the post, they cite Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (which have 6x to 3x as many users), and they cite that their posts on X are getting only 3% the engagement they saw in 2018.
By their numbers, they are not getting "eyes" on X. Just to compare, their X post has 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes, while their BlueSky post has 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes. Even their Mastodon post is getting more engagement than on X.
That's over 15x better ROI posting to BlueSky than on X.
Used by 20% of adults, of course it's mainstream, everyone knows what it is, it regularly gets quoted on TV, you are looking outside from the bubble, not at the bubble
Most organizations have an X account and announce things there because people actually see it. Most prominent political figures are there as well.
> I suspect you might be one of the "terminally online people"
Depends on what that means for you. For me it means people that can't stop posting and commenting, that have made social media their life. I don't qualify for that.
> you're denigrating as not "regular people".
Not really denigrating, it's more like people that are on alternative social media might already be more conscious about what the EFF is and does, so they're the ones that need it the least.
By analogy, think of news websites that are generally paywalled, take ages to load and only offer 'USAID propaganda'. A lot of people just won't open a link to the New York Times and their ilk because of this friction. You might as well get the same story elsewhere.
Twitter/X has become similarly 'meh', perhaps even more so. A 'tweet' is measured in characters, originally SMS message length, now biglier, but still small. In theory you could get a feature length article on the NYT-style bloated news websites, so the friction could be worth the effort - in theory. But for a tweet? Why bother, particularly if it wants you to provide your age and other details that shouldn't be necessary, but marketing dictates otherwise.
As for Musk and his politics, I don't think Bezos is any better, as for Rupert Murdoch and the other press barons, they are equally odious. Yet, if the product is any good, I can overlook such awkward realities to a certain extent. If Amazon can get me that vital part I need tomorrow rather than 'in twenty eight days', then take my money!
I am a moderately heavy user of Telegram as I prefer to get curated news from there. If bad things are happening, I want to get my news from the natives, not from the 'Epstein' empire. Much is cross posted to X but much is not. All considered, nothing beats Telegram, particularly as far as friction is concerned, it makes X, WhatsApp, Instagram and much else seem to have a dated user interface.
IMHO, EFF need to embrace Telegram, not least because it reaches people in parts of the world where the EFF message resonates.
Honestly the first time I read this I thought you meant to say "will have the chance", because I don't know of any normal people that used Xitter in years. Most are now just on Instagram. Then again, my generation and geographical locatin might have something to do with that.
The entire point of microblogging platforms like twitter is for you to be terminally online.
What the heck else do you call the service that invented "You can SMS your updates from wherever, and it will be sent out to all your followers"?
Having to "Keep up" like that is what being terminally online is
"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.
I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
You've leapt to such a strong conclusion on the basis of so little evidence.
> I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.
An EFF that refuses to use any word that you might one day see as related to intersectionality would not be able to do this.
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
Does this not apply to X users?
Nate Silver, famously popular (...lol) with the online left, made a post about this recently: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
EFF is, politically, left wing.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
For example, where did the term "freeze peach" come from?
No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC64XJl2mXg
It's a private platform, not a public utility. They can choose their customers.
Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
> We have assigned pluses to the yeas because Congress has every duty to forbid grossly illicit acts of sexual perversion in the armed forces.
It is full of things that are not what I would consider freedoms. Freedoms of companies to exploit oil reserves is one. Voting no to taxpayer funded healthcare is a good thing,apparently.
Edit: and I didnt look further than 3 clicks away. They are not hiding their political bias very well.
So no, it's not a good start.
This was a bipartisan agreement. Democrats just say "nothingburger" a lot when you talk about it.
The EFF is, and has always been, a libertarian org with a narrow focus.
If the narrative of a platform is intentionally divisive and making them appear left, leaving is the only way to both be center and present as center.
A warped perspective is hard to spot if you’ve been staring at it too long.
Reading their post they throw out every progressive buzz word for the omnicause, they are clearly aligning themselves with the progressive wing of the Democrats. The wing which is ironically some of the most anti-free speech in all of American politics.
If they came out openly as gay as an organization but kept their current stated goal of digital freedom, they still would be a digital rights organization I do not see what driveling about supposed progressive politics makes fighting for digital rights bad.
I guess you can still call yourself a digital rights organization if you want by you won’t be seen as legitimate by both sides of the aisle.
And even if true how does that make it suddenly an organization one shouldn't support?
Is saving one of two arms better than saving none because you can't save the other?
Just as an example, the Trump admin pulled funding from research units that used the words "gender" or "climate change".
Yes, it was comically inept, but it was also legitimately harmful to free speech.
And how about ICE recording the faces of people who attend the no kings protests in order to antagonize them?
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.
EFF is more like classical liberal. They generally oppose regulation of speech/tech and oppressive laws like DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) but promote things in the nature of antitrust like right-to-repair. Everything is required to be crammed into a box now so that often gets called "left" because the tech companies (also called "left") have found it more effective to pay off the incumbents in GOP-controlled states when they don't like right-to-repair laws, although Hollywood ("left" again) are traditionally the ones pressuring Democrats to sustain the horrible anti-circumvention rule when they're in power.
It turns out trying to fit everything into one of two boxes is pretty unscientific.
I mean, they were, but that no longer appears to be the case.
Basically, they can't reach X users on X.
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
The problem is that people ignore what they said, so that they can argue made up "illegitimacy".
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
Does anyone believe this?
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly?
I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets.
I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.
Especially now, with the republican party fully embracing fascism, the impact of the digital world is surfacing in our own. Technology is enabling mass surveillance, suppression, and propaganda to an extent we have never seen before, and many in our own industry who should know better are standing by or worse - contributing.
> [video] It's not free speech
It is though.
Of course it's your choice if you want to post your content there or not, but objectionable speech, _is_ free speech, and if you believe in free speech, then you should protect the speech that you don't like, because one day someone might decide they don't like your speech, and you won't be able to object to it without being admonished for the obvious hypocrisy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?
Since they didn't give the impressions for the other platforms, how can you make this conclusion?
They're the king of dark patterns that bully ppl into at least signing up for services they don't actually want to use.
Absurd statement.
Check the App Store's news app rankings: https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009
X/twitter is #1. reddit is #4, NYT is #11, Fox is #16, AP is #18, CNN is #21.
That's not a dying platform as much as you clearly wish that were true. The question is why are you so hellbent on convincing people something that is clearly not dying; is dying?
If X is dying, CNN, AP, Fox and NYT are stone cold corpses with reddit having its last gasp.
Threads apparently overtook X for DAUs last year according to SimilarWeb.
Total daily active users (all access methods) is overwhelmingly for X. I can't find the trend for web. Please post the link you found.
Disclaimer: I use neither.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai...
I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.
This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.
Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.
I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.
EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.
This should not be taken to mean that they never take on non-leftist causes or clients or never successfully work in coalition with non-leftist organizations. It's most about how they see what they are trying to do.
I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.
It's very apparent to me that EFF was more skillful at staying neutral on a wider range of questions in the past than it is now. I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.
(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)
I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.
I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.
Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.
It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".
There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.
There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.
(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/sierra-club-s...
This appears to be part of a greater pattern of semi-bipartisan organizations veering to the left and losing credibility.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.
For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.
The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.
However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.
The religious right tends to be against all forms of sexual education that aren't based around abstinence and usually want explicit parental involvement, but many on the left feel a basic but complete sexual education is important to educate kids about consent and bodily autonomy, which often helps children recognize things like grooming and assault where other forms of education fail.
Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech. The EFF still needs to navigate these issues to be effective, but I don't think the old coalition holds like it used to.
Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that
- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice
- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.
So where is the issue that you mention?
I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.
As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."
I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?
When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.
Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.
Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!
No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"
As you correctly point out, people who liked each of these administrations were often unhappy when we sued them, and often assumed that we were politically biased against them. I always encountered people who effectively said "my party is using power appropriately for good purposes, and you should not question how we use power; that only helps my opponents". Part of the civil liberties framework and something that EFF has done well (including since the time it's become significantly left-leaning) is questioning how every administration uses power.
So, I'm absolutely not suggesting that EFF should praise or celebrate the Trump administration or not sue it.
> No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"
I completely agree with this.
They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.
My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.
I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.
Wait, when did this happen? What are you referring to here?
Could you share some examples?
The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing
You may want to skim the rest of the comments to understand the issue. The X platform is where many conservatives and centrists reside.
I don't have an issue with EFF wanting to no longer align itself with anyone who is not on the Left, but I prefer they just state that instead.
"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...
There is certainly a formula where e.g. single-issue PACs will support candidates of different parties who agree to support their issue. One of my EFF colleagues around 2009 (???) briefly experimented with making a separate PAC organization to lobby on copyright issues by donating to candidates (intentionally both Democrats and Republicans) who would agree to support the PAC's legislative principles. That PAC project only lasted one or two election cycles and I don't specifically remember why; I think the likeliest reason was simply a lack of donors.
Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.
There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:
• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.
• Respond to the speech with more speech.
Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.
It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.
So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.
It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.
The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.
The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.
What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.
Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.
[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.
It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.
I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".
I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:
It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking
In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.
Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.
Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.
[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.
> I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one (small data point to think about - the reddit r/jailbait controversy was in 2011, and that was when, AFAICT, Reddit first implemented policies beyond "anything except outright illegal speech". I also remember that, regardless of ones opinion on the topic, Reddit didn't really have a choice in the matter - they would have been sued or legislated out of existence if they didn't ban r/jailbait and similar subreddit. I also have trouble believing either the "old" ACLU or EFF would have defended the r/jailbaiters, but you were there at the time so maybe you could offer insight).
But I'd argue that this isn't just some opinion change. One of the unstated beliefs of many who believed in the power of free speech is basically that when people are free to speak out, the "best" ideas, or at least the factually true ideas, win out. I don't know how you could be alive on this planet for the past 15 years and still believe that.
To take a relatively non-political example, look at Ann Reardon, a YouTuber who originally got big with a baking channel but switched to "food debunking videos" because there was so much food bullshit online, and worst, "food porn" makers were hawking cheap, bright videos of recipes online that were inherently impossible while real amazing bakers (who showed recipes that actually, truthfully worked) were having to leave YouTube because their views plummeted in the face of "So Yummy" and the like.
Similarly, take the rise of MAHA, which has now mainstreamed pseudoscience and rejected evidence-based policies. Fine, one could argue there is a lot of opinion baked into that statement, but in a lot of cases some MAHA pronouncements make no sense because they're not even self-consistent. Like the new nutrition guidelines literally say "When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil." Except olive oil, despite being a great choice for many people because it is high in oleic acid, is actually a very poor source of essential fatty acids. There are lots of other BS items I could bring up with respect to MAHA, that's just one that is so undeniably clear that the authors didn't know what they were talking about.
To emphasize, I think the rise on the left of "you're a bad person if you say the wrong things as we define them" is not just a horrible, but ultimately extremely counterproductive, approach. I myself have very little idea what the optimal solution is, but I think technology, with its algorithmic feeds and difficulty that it presents differentiating bots from humans, has fundamentally changed a lot of the "axioms" people assumed with free speech absolutism, and to deny that feels like sticking one's head in the sand.
So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.
But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.
People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".
Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.
Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.
Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.
A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.
Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.
Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com?
I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.
And while I respect everyone on it for their achievements, from their own bios and other political work they're involved in you can clearly tell which stated goal is in service of another.
I've met and spoken to at least half of them and...yeah.
John Gilmore is gone. Brad Templeton is gone. John Perry Barlow is dead. The civil libertarian bent that the organization began with is long gone.
EFF is a Ship of Theseus like any other.
And even if that was the reason, that doesn't make sense. They're an activist organisation, their goal is to promote their ideas to people that need to hear them, and twitter users need that more than bluesky users.
Btw. I login to twitter once every few months to share my blog post or report. That's not a political statement.
It is indirectly a political statement to use Twitter. You are supporting Elon Musk who has made himself a central figure in extreme right wing political views.
I'm in the same boat - not 10 years, but regularly, and a significant amount of money (for me).
I'm a bit confused now. Their post is absolutely not convincing (for the reasons you outlined - tweeting does not cost anything, and despite what they say they clearly get a lot of outreach there). I think I'll evaluate their achievements with more scrutiny before my next yearly donation.
Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows.
Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish.
EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.
"Young folks, folks of color, queer folks". This is not the case.
What does it matter to you anyway?
>A nonprofit web host got a copyright demand—for a photo it didn’t post. They removed it anyway. The law firm still demanded money. EFF pushed back, and the claim fell apart. <link to article>
I can't see how anyone could see this as engaging.
>And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
They do not explain why it's contradictory. "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too." can just as well apply to X.
I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?
We used to use it back then because it was a pretty open system, you could famously do analysis on Hashtags, it was even a fad in the scientific community to do sentiment analysis on some topics, twitter was like the Drosophila Melanogaster. The tech stack was very public as well and it had that startup vibe to it. Even presidents were registering on the platform due to its neutrality, which made sense back then.
Nowadays the company was acquired, and acquired not by a nameless penny pinching fund, but by a personalist company who might have bought it for personal, not economic reasons. They were involved in the executive power and did a similar kind of personnel cut and regime change. The presidents now use it, but now people use Twitter because presidents are on it, rather than the other way around.
It still has some professionals in it, and it's relaxed and addictive nature allows me to interact with professionals I wouldn't have a chance to on uptight Linkedin. But meh, it's not like sharing a shitpost with a CEO of a cool startup is going to be my ticket to stardom anyway, if anything it's a bad signal "Hey, remember me? I responded to your tweet about AI with a cool factoid while you wiped your ass on the toilet!" who gives a shit.
Hopefully I too will leave twitter some day, some day.
This is an organization with such a clear orientation that they belong at @eff@mastodon.social and neither X nor Facebook to me (where they’re apparently staying). Why not mind your brand and presence and avoid those slop networks where few F/OSS oriented folks are present anyway.
For what it's worth most social media is in a doom spiral right now. It's a mixture of technical issues surged by LLMs and social reasons related to the highly polarizing landscape we are in today. I don't have good solutions and I personally am perfectly fine not being involved in this chapter of the book of the Internet, even if it is the final chapter.
But then there's no explanation really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use X every day. This platform hosts mutual aid networks and serves as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the app isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
You own a small business that depends on X for customers. Your abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community. Our presence on X is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how this platform suppresses marginalized voices, enables invasive behavioral advertising, and flags posts. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
We stay because the people on this platform deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
1) Supporters who may become donors
2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters.
If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose.
Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire.
The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.
exactly why so many are turning it off, trying to get healthy, not just looking for another echo chamber to feed their egos
Maybe it would be worth it if, as you say, they are finding ways to reach non-supporters, but Twitter has been X for almost four years. If the EFF finds that they're not recruiting people from among their opponents, then they can reasonably say that they've spent enough time trying.
Experience, success, credentials none of it matters anymore. The left thinks everything on the right is stupid and evil, the right does the same, and everyone drinks their own kool aid.
We’ve all stopped listening.
If you have to resort to such tactics to make your arguments, consider rethinking your positions instead.
It only takes one quick google search to show that he helps promote white supremacist rhetoric:
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/elon-musk-nick-fuentes-x-ac...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67446800
Don't worry, there's more.
An earlier signal was when the EFF ejected one of their founders from the board for disagreeing with their mission creep https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/25/john_gilmore_removed_... See http://www.toad.com/gnu/ and also the HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992462
People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.
And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?
I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.
What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.
> What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people
13 million impressions, not 13 million people.
They have made 399 posts to YouTube over the life of their YouTube channel, so that's an average of 20 posts a year.
I'm sorry, but you're projecting a subtext.
I'm neither a supporter nor opponent; I only see the EFF's rhetoric as way for themselves and their supporters to lie about their mutual contempt for their opponents.
Just because they issue one post that is targeting their supporters doesn't mean that they don't care or are ignorant about the broader audience. That's ridiculous.
It's like saying organizations should have a branded presence on 4chan otherwise they might not reach the very online and meme-poisoned demographics.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions
Who said they need to tweet 5 times a day on average? For important announcements, tweet. Make it, I don't know, a tweet every few days. Even with somewhat reduced exposure, it's still wide exposure; and if you count heads rather than impressions, it's even more significant to be on different platforms.
I have a(n unfounded) suspicion that this may be about the cultural signaling of staying or not staying on twitter.
I used to respect the exodus, but these days my mental heuristics go off with red alert at the sight of a Bluesky icon replacing Twitter in a website footer.
That's an ironic argument from someone trying to argue for Twitter
X, however, is pro free speech. Everyone is platformed. Everyone can discuss. Everyone can debate. It is a bubble that protects free speech from censorship. The left struggles to understand it and retreats to bluesky.
What’s more, the EFF numbers seem to tell a story of shadowbanning as another commenter said, not merely dying engagement.
You don’t have a “free speech” microphone on X. You just have a place where you can hang out with others that are also sharing views most of the people outside the US find atrociously medieval. Power to you I guess.
(And before you call me “the left” - I’m not; I just don’t live in the Overton window that is across the Atlantic).
Defending my own shared identity, I have to repeatedly mention how bifurcated our society is. We are still trying to get out of the water.
The truth and people telling it fear no debate. Debate isn't allowed on blusky.
Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention:
https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20
Also, people want to hear from individuals or a distinct voice, not an organization:
Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook.
It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size.
Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate.
Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.
In any case, my point was more about the silly idea that it's imperative for any organization to be on the 8th-largest US site.
This makes absolutely no sense because EFF is staying on those platforms, so this point is also moot.
It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...
If you actually read the article you would see the entire section they dedicated to addressing exactly this complaint. But then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?
If you actually understood the section in question you would see it doesn't explain in any coherent manner why they're sticking with Facebook but not Twitter. But if you understood it then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
EFF knows its audience. No doubt that's why "X" isn't working so well for them.
Most tech professionals do not fit these categories, however much powers that be have tried to change that.
~ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verifica...
I've previously written to the EFF on it with no response.
I like what they do.
I think they’d be better off avoiding publicly declaring their anti-Musk credentials. I mean I know it’s like a rite of passage for all virtue signalling tribal leftwingers out there, but I always imagined EFF represented everyone. Not just the green haired nose-ringed “modern audience” who think they’re a majority (but actually aren’t)
13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.
Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.
What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit.
E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.
But they won't. That isn't how modern social networks work, and X definitely isn't an exception. The chronological feed of people you follow is long gone.
1. Are they spending less to get content promoted?
2. Are they posting links outside of twitter back to twitter less often?
3. Are they linking links to twitter in all their site traffic like they used to?
4. Is their site traffic in general the same as it used to be?
There is no analysis - just flat contextless numbers clearly designed to make it sound like "X is dying, we're taking our ball and going home" in a sour grapes sort of way.
disclaimer: anti elon, very pro-LGTB+, pro-EFF aside from weird political snipes
I'm actually with you on basic philosophy but the weird political snipes undercut everything they're doing and I can't support any nonprofi who stonewalls questions about what they're doing with my money.
... paraphrase: meet people where they are at ....
Sounds even more contradictory now!
And the traffic loss doesn't explain it. That is a sunk cost fallacy.
But Musk is actively *evil* and using this company specifically to serve his dark narrative and agenda. Thank EFF for quitting, was about time
What about the marginalized people organizing on X? They don't deserve EFF
So of course it probably feels bad from EFF's perspective that they are no longer receiving the "50 to 100 million impressions a month" and instead get more realistic "2 million views" per post. Which I'd assume is probably better reflection of the natural size of their audience.
Even if this comparison is wrong... Another way to think about this is The GNU/Linux desktop marketshare. For a long-time it was some fraction of a 1% of users. Those users cared about their digital rights (among other things) more than the inconveniences it caused them. And that group is a really small faction of the whole desktop market.
I'm not saying EFF's message isn't important. But I doubt that it ever was interesting enough to naturally receive "50 to 100 million impressions a month" even back in 2018.
I mean, seriously, if whatever they posted on Twitter actually helped anyone (I'd be surprised, but what do I know), then obviously they'd want to deliver it through every channel available to as many people as they can. If not, and they just want to show their protest by quitting — well, at least they could have tried to get themselves banned on Twitter and whine about it later everywhere else. But this — it's just pathetic.
an HN: "Cmon, you gotta stand in the biggest cesspit in the world, how else would you reach so many turds? Maybe you could tailor your clean water message to be less woke?"
EFF: "Our message is not amenable to asking grok to take its clothes off and give it a pacifier"
Or maybe they can just use their limited resources on places where their efforts are working.
Yes! urgently! Why wouldn't they? That's where (I assume) the most opposing people are. That should be the most important outreach. If they can get one person (from what I assume) is their most distant idealogue, then who couldn't they convince?
Disclaimer: I've literally never once used truth social.
Killed it and made just another shitty "progressive" sockpuppet, like what happened to Amnesty International?
There is stuff conservatives can support, but some shitheads decide they just must make it a "progressives only" club. Hurray for inclusion.
The reason I'm not on X is because I just won't use a platform owned by someone who thinks Nazi salutes are just free expression (of desire to censor political opposition into utter powerlessness before purging them), so I'm not complaining about the Blue in Bluesky.
Nonetheless what it's abundantly clear that whatever audience I need to connect with, I cannot effectively do it on BlueSky. They need desperate overhaul to fix the self-selection bias that is likely making the platform appealing to only a very certain kind of ant.
Whatever irrational/ideological notions are convincing you everyone quit simply aren't founded in reality.
I've donated to EFF in the past, but this message will have me thinking to spend those resources somewhere else.
- "what is the marginal cost of posting on X, it costs 0$!", which is obviously false. From a labor cost pov, but also because twitter charges for engagement.
- "this is clearly ideological"
- 'EFF is no longer neutral"
It almost seems... coordinated.
Community Notes mean that if you see misleading information, it is accompanied by facts. It even uses notifications to show you corrections to something you saw previously.
Free speech is actually encouraged and is flourishing.
Grok is a world class AI tool.
If you seek some other org that still does what it says and fights for speech: https://www.fire.org/
kennywinker•1d ago
sirbutters•1d ago
solid_fuel•1d ago