I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019.
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.
It was over for me when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet. The EFF had previously been a client of mine so I was somewhat familiar with how things worked and basically once Gilmore was out, it went downhill.
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.
What specific cause are you referring to here as government censorship of the internet?
> when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet
Wait, when did this happen? What are you referring to here?
It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.
Too late to edit, but I realized that the correct dates for my time at EFF are actually 2001 to 2020 (I was thinking about how I left during the COVID-19 pandemic, but that was in 2020).
> 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.
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?
I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.
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.
To be slightly more (maybe less) fair from an admittedly leftist bias, I think that the example of age verification misses another important component that has been pulled into the culture wars: a lot of age verification laws also target things like sexual education, which in some cases is construed to mean anything that touches on queer identities, even biographies and basic educational material.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'd say both of those.
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.)
Reminds me of when I checked the Sierra Club website a year or so ago (I'm a big fan of American National Parks) only to find that their most prioritized element of their "values" was "anti-racism".
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.
Civilized people on the right are also anti-racist. Is anti-racism really a partisan issue to you?
It's only partisan if the other side is racist. And in that case I see no issue with taking the anti-racist side.
I think we can all agree that racism is a bad thing but staunchly declaring "anti-racism" as your priority seems to veer into the territory of consistently finding racism where there is none. It sounds suspiciously like historic witch hunting (and I hate that this term has been recently overused practically to the point of ruination).
How does it seem to do so? Please give me examples.
Racism is a societal ill, so it will express itself through many channels in society, and it will be embedded in the systems that we institute (just like other biases and attitudes do). Therefore identifying racism even when it isn't explicit or flagrant is pretty common and reasonable thing to do.
I don't think I've ever run into anti-racists who are trying to invent issues, or discover racism where there is none.
I am struggling to see what the issue is.
The detractors here keep vague-posting and it's very pathetic.
My impression is that as EFF's executive leadership has evolved over time, the driving motivations and attitudes of that leadership has changed EFFs style of execution.
It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".
I hear what you're saying and it's very insightful. But I'm under the impression the libertarians have moved a lot closer to fascism I'm the recent years so it's hard to keep them in any tent. The "society has become more polarized" is an euphemism to describe an important rise of fascism across the world and in the US (that I'm not a citizen of). Yes it's polarized, because there's a side that's trying to create a political police and camps to deport everyone they disagree with as "illegal immigrants".
Circling back to EFF, I have seen many important legal issue related to digital freedom that I thought was important where they were involved. I think they're serving their mission. This decision makes sense, it's just a little bit late
This is part of the political polarization narrative. People are far more quick to throw around the word “fascist” for coalitions that support things like effective policing of crime or immigration controls that would result in a similar level of immigration as the recent past.
You're saying some people want a particular end, and that justifies certain illegal, violent, and discriminatory means.
I'd say those people support authoritarian politics at the least. Now add in the context of the end in question (less immigration of racialized people) and the means in question (indiscriminately imprisoning minorities), that in itself is well in line with fascism.
> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X
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.
>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.
I just checked their Facebook and X page. The X page is getting much more eyes. For instance, they posted their article "The FAA’s “Temporary” Flight Restriction for Drones is a Blatant Attempt to Criminalize Filming ICE" to both accounts. The results:
X: 1,500 likes, 50 comments, 846 shares.
Facebook: 58 likes, 8 comments, 22 shares.
Bluesky: 94 likes, 3 comments, 51 shares.
I think it has been proven again and again that these "engagement numbers" are a mix of bots, social media company itself trying to inflate the numbers, and real engagement. Unless there is an impartial third party, these numbers are there to attract advertisers. In this situation, I would trust the source themselves, i.e. account holders.
Are likes some ultimate metric? What kind of person of target audience keeps liking any post of anything that pops up?
No and no obviously, they dont target some desperate addicted teens
Likes are obviously correlated with the number of views a post gets. I am not sure what point you are trying to make.
That assumption is only true if there is no manipulation of likes. I believe that the presence of bot farms has been extensively documented by now, which should disprove the usefulness of likes on any social media platform nowadays.
I for one never understood github stars
Like I don't care about stars at all as a consumer as a developer nor as a repository owner.
You are making lots of assumptions when evaluating GitHub projects that you aren’t writing here.
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).
You realize these numbers are meaningless right?
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.
but the article opening with a paragraph saying "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out".
One can't justify quitting because the number is falling, and claims the number does not matter at the same time. or can it?
Much fewer bots on X than Facebook. I think you are completely wrong.
But it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.
You can just look at the numbers. They're seeing 15x more engagement on BlueSky, and even more engagement on Mastodon compared to X:
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)
Which post are you looking at? I just posted the numbers for the first post I could find that was the same across X, Bluesky, and Facebook (a little hard since the feeds for all three are different). The X post had 16 times the number of likes as Bluesky and 26 times the number of likes as Facebook. The X post had 17 times the number of comments as Bluesky, 6 times the number as Facebook.
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.
They're still on youtube with low hundreds of views. Surely video content requires more effort to boot.
cant they just copy an paste the same messages? like are they trying to manage critical 'seconds' and the eff?
That's why this is clearly a political jab and not a real decision.
If there is an organization who should be promoting federated, decentralized social media services over centralized robber baron engagement factories more than the EFF, I don't know who it would be.
Its not political to prefer open systems.
The people on BlueSky and Mastodon aren't the people they need to convince in the correctness of their message.
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.
If an organisation had any serious chance of moving the needle by staying on X, musk would simply find a reason to ban them. X leadership isn't interested in fair and balanced discussion.
An online argument has NEVER EVER EVER changed anyone's mind.
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.
This just fundamentally isn't true. What people see online massively influences how they think, to the extent that entire media conglomerates have been bought and sold to do exactly that.
I specifically said "online argument". You talking to someone online, in text format. You can change people's minds in video calls, sometimes. No amount of 1-on-1 online discourse has ever changed anyone's mind on anything.
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.
So how do you know you've never changed someone's mind? Also, the opposite is just retreating to echo chambers where everyone agrees?
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.
And the EFF is also looking at conversion rates for those views. Are you convinced that the Elon-pilled still on X are interested in donations to the EFF compared with the weirdos on Mastodon?
This is on point but someone is taking offense by being called a "weirdo" (thus the down votes, I think). Yes, we are weirdos on alternate social media, just like we are weirdos who use Linux, Emacs, write Lisp, etc.. It's weird, i.e.: Unusual. "Geek" might have been a better term to use though.
Geeks and weirdos donate to EFF. :)
On average, they're getting <9,000 views per post on X. With 100 - 150K followers on both Bluesky and Mastodon, I'd expect their impressions to beat those X numbers.
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 the real reason is Musk, hidden amongst some platitudes to make the political motivation less obvious.
Its wild that we've gotten to the point that 'allows tyrants to silence users on their platform' is no longer something we're allowed to dislike without it being a 'political' stance. Some time in the last 30 years acting like a reasonable and decent human being became a political statement.
This is BS to be honest, they don't like Musk, which is ok, I have no problem with that. And they are reconstructing a reason to leave.
Musk fired 90+% of Twitter, not just the human rights team.
Bluesky and mastodon are the direction the EFF would like the internet to take, so their presence there is not tied to effectiveness in the same way.
The reason to leave ex-twitter and the reason to keep using lesser platforms may not be the same reason.
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.
There's presumably engagement on those two.
It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
"...and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube"
So pretty much all major sites except X. They are saying LinkedIn is more important to reach people than X, really?
Does it have to be either/or?
Volunteer your time to do a dual strategy with content that fits both. Comms takes time, the EFF is adapting its comm strategy.
Surely copy-pasting a short text and possibly a link is not actual work that takes time.
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.
Pushing messages out to multiple platforms is a solved problem. Parent said
> 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.
Retreating into smaller and smaller echo chambers where they get their way?
They're also still posting on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube (in addition to BlueSky and Mastodon). It's silly to suggest that anything outside of X is an echo chamber, or that one must communicate on a platform dominated by white supremacists to expose your ideas to a diverse audience.
Well, perhaps it's time to reconsider your perception of Bluesky and Mastodon.
> Something isn't adding up.
Yes, it’s your inability to do even the most basic verification of the data underlying your understanding before making claims.
Worth the time? Can you not just use some automation or tool to post your stuff to multiple platforms including X?
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.
Nobody who's not terminally online ever used Twitter.
I was about to say, Twitter has long been one of the largest collections of terminally online people and that's only gotten worse as various groups have abandoned the platform and social media as a whole has seen a decline. Most people who have a life spend their time elsewhere on the web or don't participate in social media at all.
Nobody who's not terminally online ever used BlueSky.
I stoped using Twitter (around when it was changing to be X) because 60-70% of the accounts I cared about left the platform. More and more people will look elsewhere as more organisations and people who aren’t into Musk’s politics leave.
I think that a lot of people unconsciously quit Twitter/X due to friction/hassle.
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.
Do regular people that aren't terminally online use X? I don't know any.
Something like 20% of Americans use Twitter.
not anymore. People are acting like they're leaving everything and moving to bluesky or fedi when in reality they already exist there and many other places and are simply leaving the braindead one
The few people who were not terminally online left Twitter around the time it was renamed.
The most terminally online people left Twitter for BlueSky.
Half this post is about how few people they're reaching on X.
I don't know any X user that I wouldn't describe as "terminally online" and the same goes for the Twitter days too.
> Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.
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.
> Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.
You think those people are on X?
Not if you're shadowbanned
I love getting on the computer to write stuff like “Twitter is the only website where people aren’t terminally online”
>Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.
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
What are you talking about? X is exclusively the domain of terminally-online people.
Not by a long shot. BlueSky is a cesspit of terminally online people.
'Terminally online is when you post about things I don't like'
It's funny how excited you are about BlueSky, a place that I would imagine you don't go? But somehow you know all about it?
No that's reddit, Facebook, insta and TikTok.
Based on what they are seeing, nobody is seeing their posts on X either. That's the point. Did you miss it?
The post was longer than 280 characters, and is therefore invisible to this average internet user. Apparently.
> X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.
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.
>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
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
>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.
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.
There was a recent leadership change at the EFF
It's always been political, but it used to be non-partisan.
Most people don't look at the Board of Directors.
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.
Your first sentence is key. Most people don't look behind the green curtain, but it's often where you find who the really important people in the org are.
Since when was the EFF "non-political"?
I believe "non-political" to Americans means not participating in the blue/red thing.
>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] 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.
Does this not apply to X users?
The story behind the numbers they present clearly demonstrates that X is censoring/shadowbanning them. Going from 600MM to 13MM impressions/yr -- losing 98% of their impressions! -- is no accident but clearly Musk's thumb on the scale.
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".
Is censorship the only possible explanation for the drop in impressions? Presumably the vast majority of impressions before were from bots.
"From bots" =)
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.
It sort of doesn't matter. Bottom line is it isn't an effective platform for them.
What does it take to characterize legit users also as bots
It's not necessarily shadowbanning (although it could well be), given that it's been turned into a cesspit where huge numbers of users left and the ones still there are probably not the demographic that would engage with the EFF, it could just be a natural consequence of Musk's wrecking it.
Same result, either way.
They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
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.
Do we have to be politically neutral to the abhorrent?
Probably not, but then go ahead and say it.
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.
They went ahead and said it. Literally. And remained completely legitimate.
The problem is that people ignore what they said, so that they can argue made up "illegitimacy".
So if they're politically neutral, should they have an account on Truth Social too in your opinion?
Should they not? I can’t see why truth social users shouldn’t be a target for EFF’s message
Yes. Even though I agree with a lot of what the EFF does, this is a valid reason to be skeptical of intent.
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
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?
Just above that they explain the tradeoffs leading them to leave twitter.
Basically, they can't reach X users on X.
Do you really need to reach users on X. It is filter for a specific type of user who don't share the ideals of the EFF. And racists.
I don't use Facebook, Instagram & Tiktok. But I do use X, since there the censoring is least on X amongst all those platforms.
"X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago"
Does anyone believe this?
It comes from X's own metrics, why would they lie about it?
The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
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.
EFF used to stand for a cause that was neither left nor right.
Perhaps they still do, particularly because that’s exactly what they stand for. The overall shift in perspective and narrative to the right makes them appear left.
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.
The only congressman who would actually support the EFF in digital rights is Massie, a republican.
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.
Nothing said here is of substance and instead mere projection of speculation.
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.
An organization aligning itself with progressives means they will only support a certain set of digital rights that align with progressive politics and not others.
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.
Which digital rights are exempt if you are subscribing to the "progressive" side of politics?
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?
This is a lie, certain powerful elements of the right wing are much more anti free speech.
I don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.
I worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare.
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?
EFF still does.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
Massie, a republican, and Rand Paul, another republican, are by far the most supportive of free speech politicans in congress.
By what metric?
The freedom index is a good start.
Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress
Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.
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.
Whoa!
> 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.
Looking very quickly at some of the votes being tracked, I don't see any vote that remotely qualifies as supporting or opposing free speech. Instead, they're focusing on things like "do you oppose the Federal Reserve making interest payments?" "do you oppose cryptocurrency regulations?" "do you oppose energy efficiency regulations for appliances?"
So no, it's not a good start.
You cannot be serious. Looking at the 'Freedom Index', I can see them approving of things like restricting abortion, giving the executive even more power and more.
And neither of them are MAGA. They fucking hate Trump. Republicans aren't all MAGA.
Blue Sky heavily censors its platform
Blue Sky has like 3 dozen employees or something nuts like that. They have no time to perform censoring at the scale other platforms do.
[citation needed]
No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.
So people specifically get there to be as big of an ass as they can be and then get all pikachu.jpg when they get banned?
It's a private platform, not a public utility. They can choose their customers.
Youtube videos are not reliable sources.
> ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable
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.
True as stated, but if you generalize the statement to "enemy concepts", who decided that?
For example, where did the term "freeze peach" come from?
That is incredible rewriting of history.
How? He's "investigating" CNN right now for...something? Something about them reporting on the Iran war
No, that is the obvious and clear truth. MAGA has done a pretty good job at making the opposite appear true, though.
That's when I would donate to them, annually. I still have two t-shirts.
Right went full fascist. Being moderate fascist is not an apolitical position despite being in the middle.
> EFF is, politically, left wing.
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.
> EFF is more like classical liberal.
I mean, they were, but that no longer appears to be the case.
Appears being the operative word.
> Nate Silver, [...] made a post about this recently
Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.
What makes it not tethered to reality? Do you have a different chart?
It's quite tethered to reality.
No it doesn't. Anyone sticking with X at this point is ideologically compromised. There's no reason even trying to reach them. They are hopeless.
Their logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...
there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff
13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?
Not if enough folks think your posting there is a sign you're an ass.
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.
Even if it were true, that is not the logic they cite though. They make up a story of the impressions were reduced relative to the platform's old days, not absolute terms; they don't address the cost of tweeting being minimal at all, almost certainly a year of tweeting would be less costly than writing a rant blog post against X. Many brands just autopost everything everywhere for syndication purposes.
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.
I have never seen KKK posts on X. Either you're commenting from personal experience, in which case, wow, who were you following, or you're going off reporting which would seem to be a bit skewed.
KKK memorabilia is what was said.
Literally nobody that takes this stance around X has or should have political relevancy to begin with though.
Those people would have long left X though so I'm not sure why the existing people would think that. If you're talking about external people judging them about posting there, no one thinks that, like the sibling comment mentions. People will just think at worst that they might need the reach of X so they begrudgingly post there.
X "impressions" are not worth very much
At least half of those are bots.
>there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff
what tradeoff?
This is what I haven’t seen a single person defending this attempt to answer.
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.
Sounds like: I wont get out of bed for $100k
Same, but I'll get into bed for half that
Ah I see what you are saying. You are a mattress tester.
X has more active users than it ever has in its history
I think they see X now as a branded political vanity project for one guy, much like Truth Social is for Trump. I know a lot of us see it that way.
For what good it does, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook aren't that yet (the Metaverse might have been borderline though, haha)
I had that exact same thought. The argument they presented applies to any walled garden, they gave no reason why X would be the exception.
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.
It's pretty damn simple actually. Their target audience by and large doesn't use twitter anymore, either.
They're a global issues advocacy organization. "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right.
Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.
By that logic they should be printing memos and dumping them in the Hudson, in case some of the people swimming there want to read them.
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.
>By that logic they should be printing memos and dumping them in the Hudson, in case some of the people swimming there want to read them.
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.
> "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right
Yes. If.
I would say that their targeting has changed, more than the audience itself.
The current electronic frontier is AI and X is the place where high level AI researchers, developers, influencers and users converse. IDK where else has more of the intellectual discourse on AI. Definitely not the likes of instagram or TikTok. Sure, those platforms are more censored and kid friendly, but I don't think that's really who the EFF should be focusing on as their audience.
This is a great point and it makes we worried that EFF might be pivoting to be less about the technological frontier and more about social issues.
Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.
I was recently at a brown bag at work - regarding enablement of AI in the workplace (it was awesome - all over the roadmap) - and one of the audience asked the speakers (a very diverse group of people) how on earth they keep up with all the developments in AI?
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.
My goodness, the only branch of work that I can think of where knowing something a few hours earlier is probably day trading also.
Seriously, if you're working on anything worthwhile, you can wait for the weekly digest. Everything else just seems like hyperiding.
You can still stay pretty up to date (at least in AI) without even being on X, since everything distills out to every other platform anyway. Between /r/LocalLlama and the ThursdAI and Latent Space newsletters, I'm at most only a few days away from whatever the latest hype is.
I absolutely agree with your sentiment - but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing - and so by the time you are interesting in talking about the thing that happened last week - implications, use, whether it's legit or just hype - people have all moved onto the new thing.
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.
> but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing
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.
If it no longer matters by lunch then it never mattered to begin with.
The big issue with this approach is that it will destroy your sanity for things that are often a big bag of hype with nothing underneath. I often find HN to be better because things that get on the front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
> things that get on the [HN] front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
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
HN is still great but it’s in decline, I still hear about AI developments on r/LocalLlama and X sometimes weeks before they make it here if even at all.
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.
You haven't seen negative AI sentiments until you visit Lemmy =)
Can you recommend any particular community on Lemmy for those negative sentiments?
Just pick anything tech related and post something that's even mildly ambivalent about AI.
Unless you're curbstomping AI for being "slop", you'll get an instant deluge of downvotes.
FSM help you if you post something positive =)
> FSM help you if you post something positive =)
Ramen
The manual unflagging pf political stories and the rampant political advocacy that encouraged has destroyed a lot of the value of HN. Inconvenient facts are downmodded, “no u” gets votes.
> Having an extensively curated list
This is key.
I had to reluctuntaly create an account on twitter after years because of the exact same reason. AI research discussion is more active there than anywhere else. I've tried to use nitter's rss feed to stave off of the platform but it was limiting.
Well, Twitter has a lot of separate spheres. It's pretty easy to curate just tpot (the part that concerns itself with the Bay area, venture capital, and so forth) by following the right people and then engaging with posts that are on-topic.
What does the abbreviation stand for?
"That part of Twitter."
twcu
Even when it was Twitter drinking from the firehose didn't really make your life better. I don't need a two sentence breaking update from a Miyazaki baby to stay on top of this stuff, and quite frankly if they can't bother to make a blog post or press release it's probably just noise any way.
This assumes that "breaking news" is accurate, it's not, nor is "breaking news" ever worth reading.
This is just busy work chasing nothing but vanity.
Like asking heroin addicts what heroin they prefer. What an utter waste time.
bsky is meant to hold the promise of control your algorithm, I don't see why that can't be the model going forward
The problem is largely one of community. The folks talking about AI are still primarily on X and haven't moved over.
I got off Twitter after the election and moved exclusively to Bluesky.
There's A LOT more tech stuff than people realize but the anti-AI crowd on that site is nuts.
The tech seems great, the people don't
That's just a drop compared to the ocean compared to this one time when he performed multiple nazi salute in front of an entire country, or when he single handedly decided to intervene in a foreign war via Star link control or when he messed with entire branches of the American government
> nazi salute, foreign war intervention, government influence
Leading with the supposed "nazi salute" really detracts from the other, much more legitimate and substantive issues you raised.
lol
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.
Disagree. It tells me all I need to know about the person riled up about it.
Supposed? He slapped his chest, and flung his arm hard into a heil. And then he turned around and heiled the flag.
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.
The ADL says it was an awkward gesture, not a nazi salute. Snopes says his grandparents weren't nazis. They also say there's no proof his family moved to south africa because they supported apartheid. And even if his grandparents were nazis, it wouldn't make him a nazi. I'm sure many Germans have nazi grandparents, but that doesn't make them nazis.
>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.
It's a really dark thing to me that we all watched him do it and people like yourself will just deny it.
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
Why am I supposed to care about that, as a platform user? Twitter isn't a jobs program for a particular set of engineers. I'll leave when it stops being entertaining. Comments like these are so weird.
He banned me after I replied to his tweet with my display name set as "Elon's Musk".
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
So you got banned for trolling and this is supposed to mean what exactly?
Almost as bad as saying vaccines are safe and effective.
Right now it's the #1 news app on the App Store.
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.
Of all the things he did or said, this is pretty benign
Astounds me that anyone was using the platform even before Musk took over it.
It's cheaper to try to extort more out of a sucker than setting up a proper decentralized alternative. That's how I personally see what's going on, that nobody is moving out but everyone focus on gaming the system.
> how Musk treated the engineers
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.
The same as most tech companies treat their employees?
Lots of good discussion there still if you follow the right people and block certain categories of discussion. If you use lists then you'll see no suggested content beyond who you follow.
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.
OSINT, retrogaming, fantasy art, simpsons memes, music tech news, celebrities, bizzare art projects.. I love my experience on X. I dont make any lists or anything.
They’ve also started auto-translating and cross posting Japanese X content, which has been the coolest cross-cultural thing I’ve experienced on the Internet since I started using IRC.
This is a poor take. "You can make this mismanaged steaming pile of bot-infested garbage better if you just filter everything!"
How is it a poor take? Yes that's exactly what I said to do. It's the same as Reddit, I don't read whatever garbage is on r/all, I follow specific subreddits. Honestly people should curate no matter what social media they're on and find ways to stop seeing suggested content; my Instagram shows me only people I follow too, via a third party app/mod.
This would be true if the algorithm changes were limited to for-you feeds. But the larger problem is that the set of people willing to pay for X are boosted in replies. So if that set of people, which tends towards a certain political bias, is hostile towards a poster, that poster will be driven away from posting on X.
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.
I don't care about culture and politics on X, in fact it is something I actively block. By discussion I mean tech news and trends, ie how is someone using the latest AI model or what new project was created, that sort of stuff. The people I follow provide me that, not politics. If you're there for politics then I agree with your point, look elsewhere.
On this Instagram is far worse than X. Yeah, their suggested content rarely is the sort of thing that offends delicate sensibilities, but it is generally irrelevant slop and Meta always seems to be conspiring to trap you in it, giving you few options to remove it from your feed.
Yep, thankfully there are mods to remove it all.
The problem is that there isn't really an alternative. The discussion is still happening there and nowhere else. (Trust me, I've looked.)
You'd be surprised how easy it is for people to compartmentalize their principles. Many do it day to day every time they purchase something online that was probably made using less than ideal labour practices.
Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
Hmm, I'd argue what you call "compartmentalize their principles" is in fact, NOT having principles.
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 would assert that a principle is a belief which guides behavior, yes, but with the understanding that the weight of the guidance and the weight of the conviction varies.
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 sentiment. But if we go this rigid with it, we might find that the majority of humanity does not have principles.
"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year."
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.
> 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.
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.
They are posting the same content in virtually identical format to other twitter clones. The whole process can be automated, the marginal cost is nothing.
I hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that.
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.
X suppresses posts from people you follow in favor of algorithmically boosted posts, so at scale the follow counts don't matter as much.
> Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them.
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.
That is my point. Who sees them? whatever the algo predicts will engage.
I'm a lifetime EFF member and have given them money multiple times, but this article is also clearly missing:
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
> 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.
On the topic of leaving X but not TikTok and Facebook: I think being principled but pragmatic is necessary more so than ever. If you always pick absolutes, you'll quickly find yourself helping nobody. It requires a right balance, otherwise you end up justifying the means to an end. Certain principles cannot be comrpromised, others are a bit of a luxury. It's a moving target. It's a fuzzy target. You'll never quite get it right but you just keep trying. I think I'm most wary of those who think too rigidly and would see this as an intolerable contradiction.
This very conveniently allows one to pick any actions they like regardless of stated goals or principles. There's very little it couldn't be used to apply to. "I'm principled but only when it's easy" isn't much of a statement.
Is there any site that keeps track of companies/orgs and/or noteworthy people who have left "X"? I've noticed some pretty significant orgs leaving in the recent year or two and have repeatedly wondered if there's some kind of list out there. I mean, it would just be a handy list to show people when I say something like "more and more people are leaving that garbage site" and they want receipts and I'm like... "uh the province of New Brunswick was the latest I saw" >_> I found this list of celebrities in the meantime, at least: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/twitter-celebr...
That is just like when those US celebs moved to Europe after Trump was elected!
Interesting timing - just days after the announcement that Nicole Ozer will be taking over for Cindy Cohn as the Executive Director of EFF.
That's really useful context, thanks for sharing!
There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025:
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?
I find it hard to believe that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have almost the exact same number of users. This seems to be skewed data.
Are they not the same users? They're all part of the same org, so it seems likely that accounts for the others are mirrored or auto-created or whatever.
plus meta cheats with all their dark patterns and UI manipulations
Meta cheats.
They're the king of dark patterns that bully ppl into at least signing up for services they don't actually want to use.
>There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform,
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.
Reddit is on the first page or at the top for well over half of my searches. Sometimes I find myself in complete physical-memory typing -site:reddit.com.
Why is this downvoted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform
Since they didn't give the impressions for the other platforms, how can you make this conclusion?
Because it's completely unfounded unhinged lunacy. Detailed why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714636
Because the data it presents is not believable
I tend to almost only use X now. I really can't use Facebook or Instagram since the introduction of "ad breaks" because I haven't given them ability to give me "personalised ads".
Don't get me started on tiktok...
EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.
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?
I must confess this is an odd decision. It's true that the drop in engagement is abismal (97% reduction is ouch). However, given that they're still posting in other sites, what's the marginal cost of keeping X in the equation? Presumably they're using some aggregator where you compose the post once and it gets automatically posted to BlueSky, Mastodon, Thread, etc., what's the cost of keeping X?
Virtue signaling is priceless.
They will accomplish nothing and be happy, like so many.
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.
Agree on that, bsky trolls are pretty much as bad as twitter ones
Why does that trigger a red alert?
Pattern recognition - people who are on bsky are overly concerned with pronouns and extreme leftist ideology and/or extreme hate for trump. There is no actual discourse. Just a bubble where there is no tolerance for debate or difference of opinion.
>There is no actual discourse. Just a bubble where there is no tolerance for debate or difference of opinion.
That's an ironic argument from someone trying to argue for Twitter
Agreed, Twitter suspended accounts for "misgendering" and sharing Hunter Biden laptop stories. It was a bubble that protected leftists.
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.
“Everyone” isn’t platformed on X, I’ve seen enough stories of Musk himself banning people he doesn’t like from the platform with plenty of audience cheering him on.
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).
Brain ghosts, got it
It's a signal of lying, closed minded, authoritarian, sexist, and racist ideologues.
The truth and people telling it fear no debate. Debate isn't allowed on blusky.
I follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.
So they are chasing engagement, and X isn't giving them the attention they think they deserve.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
Yeah, pretty sad to try and package it around morals. There were 2 dozen cataclysmic events on X since Elon walked in with the kitchen sink but THIS is the final straw. "Not my views!"
I am puzzled, not at EFF - this decision seems congruent with their ideals - no, I'm puzzled at the amount of comments on here that care so deeply about them staying on X, so much to garner 1000+ comments! So many people here seem to be taking this move as an offense at themselves. Why do people care so much about a private social media site?
This post gives me the same feeling when someone at work tells me how they do CrossFit. You don’t have to signal so hard, just make a decision and do it. Not everything is a moral lesson that has to become some kind of sermon and honestly, that post told me everything I needed to know about where the EFF is. The EFF Punk rock style is dead and long live the complainers.
Agreed, it started with # of impressions declining... Maybe Kenyatta should have thought that less people care about what is posted? Or, there are other things to interest us vs 2018?
I've donated to EFF in the past, but this message will have me thinking to spend those resources somewhere else.
I don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?
Brand reputation. Every brand that chooses to use X implicitly supports X, even if they're not verified & paying X money.
Does anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.
The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.
Yes, people do in fact judge others for their associations.
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.
My neighbor blares Fox in their kitchen every day. I view them with the same flavor of suspicion as someone who posts there.
Yeah, I do. People & brands having a link to an X account is a huge red flag. It's a public statement that you support child pornography and the end of democracy in the US. That's going to tarnish a brand pretty majorly.
Twitter has become a lot better since people who say truly insane things like this have left. What on earth does Twitter have to do with child pornography? What kind of misinformation have you been reading?
Yes.
I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
Yes, absolutely. The CEO of X did Nazi salutes and promotes white genocide narratives, Grok has created posts praising Hitler, and when people used Grok to publicly generate CSAM for free, they fixed it by putting it behind a subscription platform. The only people I know and respect who are still on X are sex workers, because X is still the most porn-friendly social media site.
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.
I do, yeah. Hope that helps!
Going against the network effect out of principal doesn't seem to be a winning strategy when the goal is to raise awareness about issues.
> Brand reputation
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.
That is idiotic.
I've coded a 3rd party tool that could post to mastodon/twitter at the same time around 2020 (plenty of idle time during covid). I lost twitter API access, never bothered to try to make it work again (i hate working with interface clickers). to be clear, i don't really post on social media, it was just an experiment because i had faaar too much time and thought at the time that this kind of product could be interesting.
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.
No, they even would get money for the engagement they get. This is purely moral grandstanding disguised as something else.
Not sure this is true anymore. X is now just pay to play. Organic engagement is completely dead there. It's all a virality game now.
Moral grandstanding is much better then vice grandstanding. Moral grandstandings are good, especially in a world that think being moral makes you a looser.
That being said, there is no disguise.
"But You're Still on X?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
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.
Are they leaving because of low views? This means they are more concerned about views than anything else? I thought any sane company wants as much exposure anywhere no matter the political stance or other views.
It's pretty obvious nobody here uses social media because EFFs pages on Facebook, Bluesky, and TikTok get like tens of impressions per post if that.
What is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?
It’s just a word. People is fine too. Folks just sounds better.
If that were true then they would have written:
"Young folks, folks of color, queer folks". This is not the case.
How very astute of you. I was of course talking about folks sounding better combined with queer. This is subjective of course, but the writers agreed.
What does it matter to you anyway?
As one of them queer folks, it just rolls of the tongue easier.
It’s just another word for a group, same as people.
if you're a political action group then voluntarily choosing to limit the eyeballs on the ideas you're trying to espouse seems so counterproductive and antithetical for your raison d'être that it's hard not to look at this as shooting oneself in the foot. The PR person who thought this up is doing more harm than good. There's no way the metrics will improve because of this decision.
So should they make a Truth Social account too? Should they be posting on 4chan? Do they need to take out AM radio ads to really make sure they're reaching everyone?
Or maybe they can just use their limited resources on places where their efforts are working.
>So should they make a Truth Social account too?
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.
So the nazi salute wasn’t enough to make them drop X, but the view count is?
He did not do a Nazi salute. That is propaganda from legacy media. He has never even said anything remotely Nazi-like. He is pro free speech, pro humanity, pro USA.
The Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute,[7] but other Jewish organizations disagreed and condemned the salute.[8][9][10][11] American public opinion was divided on partisan lines as to whether it was a fascist salute.[12] Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated it as a Nazi salute.[15][16]
Don't trust my words, just look at the salute yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
Why would a Nazi go to Israel, meet with Netanyahu, visit Auschwitz and light a candle in solidarity, and generally support Jews? It makes no sense.
People just hate Elon and call everyone a Nazi. It is not an accusation that is taken seriously anymore.
I think the psyop for the past year has unironically been that Israelis are nazis. It sounds dumb, because it is.
Because we aren't in Germany in the 1930s, the context is different, and the "other" different.
Lots of anti-semites also like what Israel is doing, because they hate arabs even more, and of course, a lot of them are fundamentalist christians that believe the biblical Israelites have to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem before Jesus can return.
After Israel implemented apartheid, they became an example for ethnonationalist supremacist groups. You know, like what the nazis were. Israel was one of the last countries to support apartheid South Africa (led by nazis), it's currently conducting a genocide against Palestinians, is aggressively expanding into nearby countries, and is at constant war.
Elon Musk also very clearly heiled. Just look up a video. He slaps his chest and flings his arm out in a textbook nazi salute. Then he turns around and heils the US flag. Elon Musk's grandfather was a Canadian nazi (card-carrying member!) who moved to South Africa in order to support apartheid. His mother was, similarly a supporter of apartheid and a staunch racist. He has been brought up in this ideology.
Elon is a nazi and so is Netanyahu.
To be clear, when I say nazi, I do not mean "card-carrying member of the nazi party" (except Musk's grandpa), I mean someone who thinks there is an in group that is superior to others, who should have more power, more rights, and should be allowed to destroy the other. It does not matter who the other is, the can be jewish (1930s nazis), palestinian (zionists), south amreican or somali (MAGA), or something else.
"Don't believe your lying eyes", eh?
You must have simply missed it, because it was recorded and everyone with eyes can clearly see it. Maybe it's just not spread very widely in your media bubble.
Here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw
PS: You're defending a billionaire who would poison the water in your grandmother's neighborhood to save a few cents on his tax bill. Poor people like you mean nothing to him. He even treats his daughter like shit, just because she was brave enough to live her life as her own. He's a morally bankrupt person, who got where he is by treading on and abusing people, just like any other billionaire.
Your line of reasoning has been attempted already, nearly verbatim. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47712820
No, the observation that you are a politically motivated actor telling us to ignore evidence that we saw with our own eyes was repeated by myself and another person, because it rhymes exactly with historical precedent. That wasn't the "line of reasoning", it was a quote.
The line of reasoning is everything which came after, which you of course ignored.
"Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?"
It is a Rorschach test.
I see an awkward attempt of someone with Asperger's saying "my heart goes out to you", which is what he said while making the gesture.
You apparently saw a Nazi salute.
Given he has no other Nazi tendencies before or since, I did not see a Nazi salute.
In fact he visited Israel after Oct 7, a decidedly non-Nazi thing to do. Netanyahu himself praised Elon and said he is being smeared.
If we would talk about my local pizza restaurant here: Very nice move.
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.
Hmmm... They talk about inability to reach out to people at Twitter... but isn't this more about market correction? I often thought that EFF on Twitter was artificially boosted because they were often visible in contexts that really had nothing to do with their core mission. Current Twitter management did state afaik and understand to stop this kind of thing from happening.
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.
Seems like any activist org should have two audiences:
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.
> signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire
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
They ejected the man responsible for "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Sweet mother earth.
You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.
I read the post.
> 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.
Do you think an X impression has the same value or impact of a YouTube view? I very much doubt it.
> What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people
13 million impressions, not 13 million people.
I imagine the new pay per use pricing for the X API has something to do with it. If you're reaching single digit percentage impressions and now you have to pay for that as well ...
If you think it is "essentially zero cost", I'm going to respectfully suggest you do not understand what you read. If you think they reached 13 million people on X last year, you do not understand social media.
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.
The post feigns outreach but the "Facebook and Tiktok are Evil" section blatantly panders to EFF supporters. It frontloads identity-group-affirming language to justify using platforms its supporters dislike at while saying nothing critical about platforms its supporters enjoy (Bluesky / Mastodon). That selective scrutiny suggest the EFF either doesn't care or is ignorant about the hang-ups of non-supporters, e.g., conservative and center-right folks.
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.
It's really weird that the EFF would post something on their own site to speak to their supporters, and that it would employ "identity-group-affirming language".
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.
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
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.
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.
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.
In this case, dealing with The Enemy is not only funding them, but lending your credibility.
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.
Credibility with who? We’re so polarized that a single binary label will shift all credibility.
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 we all spent more time listening the guy who called someone a pedophile because he suggested the guy's plan to save people was ridiculous, would that improve discourse? I am skeptical.
Perhaps EFF doesn’t want to find and legitimize the people pushing such divisivness.
yeah, but twitter is 90% assholes these days
sadly, all social media is 90% a-holes these days
exactly why so many are turning it off, trying to get healthy, not just looking for another echo chamber to feed their egos
Not all of it. But I'm not about to advertise the exceptions to a general audience. :-P
Always has been
It sounds like they don’t really get meaningful engagement/views on X anyway though. It sounds like it’s not a useful platform to reach any audience for them.
Not having an official account doesn’t mean that people are blocked from talking about EFF, only that it’ll happen by directing attention towards their website. URLs still work great for letting people talk, but there is a real question about whether you encourage people to look for you first on someone else’s property–effectively supporting their business by giving them your content and audience.
I do not see how being on a platform literally chasing away people with hate, sexism and outright CSAM is somehow making a wrong decision about audiences to attract...can you drop your political bias red colored shades and address this?
You could literally be describing any modern day social network with those slurs.
How many other social network sites have their CEO posting and promoting white supremacist rhetoric?
X, the non-consensual nudes app, surfaces the dumbest comments in any discussion by design. It is not a serious site, having a presence there is not meaningful.
It's like saying organizations should have a branded presence on 4chan otherwise they might not reach the very online and meme-poisoned demographics.
imagine writing a post explaining that after careful deliberation you're no longer copying and pasting your posts from one website to another and trying to pass that off as strategy
"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
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.
Honestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed:
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:
I still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.
I got my account banned on Tweeter for literally doing nothing. I mainly had it because Twitter requires you to have an account in order to read tweets and occasionally I needed to read a tweet there. A few weeks ago my account got suspended. Oh well.
Maybe twitter thought that your account was used as a proxy for nitter? I think it's really annoying that you need to be logged in to see most posts.
Xcancel.com still works ok to read occasional tweets.
>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" >Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
But then there's no explanation really.
Well, at least they realize they're hypocrites.
Something like leaving X and staying on Linkedin (and the other platforms) is kinda funny
It is, but the other one is a link to their twitter post, whereas this is the longer self-hosted statement. This is a better, more informative source.
Just noting it. The other post was submitted earlier. The mod's can figure out how to combine/reconcile. Update: I think you are correct and this one won :)
There’s people still using x?!
It's the most popular news app in the world according to Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009
Whatever irrational/ideological notions are convincing you everyone quit simply aren't founded in reality.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
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.
It could also be that the world as a whole cares less about privacy today than they did seven years ago. Without a relative measurement from a similar platform, it's a bit of an empty statement
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)
They divide up users into groups a la Google+ groups(separate and against following/followers system) and restrict global visibility of your tweets unless you win the daily lottery, in which case your tweet gets bajilion views, or something. Attempts to bypass that system is penalized.
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.
Definitely both, potentially with one driving the other. While Twitter has always had an inclination towards quippy hot takes and similar, in its transformation into X it's taken a hard turn towards junk politically-slanted engagement bait above all else[0]. Content with any semblance of substance or nuance and especially anything misaligned with controlling interests gets buried.
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.
I'm a former EFF member and donor and have an X account. Their engagement problem isn't with X or X's members. It's with the EFF itself.
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.
This reads like the classic Youtuber whose annoyed their views dropped (this almost always amounts to 'people don't actually like your content as much as you thought').
>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 much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.
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.
I work as a consultant for a small media, zero politics and very technical, and they report the same trend for X for the last 5 years or so. I was surprised that they told me they still want the "share on Twitter button" and keep the Twitter account but their activity there is nil, for the following reasons combined: 1) they have thousands of followers and thousands of impressions, but the engagement ratio (likes, comment, shares per follower) is abysmal compared with the other networks, 2) the format is different from other networks, while you can create something common for LinkedIn or Facebook, the Twitter share requires image re-crop and text rewrite (they don't use Instagram, the content doesn't fit) 3) while the main site receives a lot of clicks to read the full content (and see the ads that drive the income) from LinkedIn and Facebook, Twitter doesn't send clicks (people just read the header, at most hit the like-heart, and keep scrolling). Their conclusion: Twitter doesn't work any more for them and is getting worse (that said, BlueSky is even worse for them). Even spending 30 seconds there to polish a publication are 30 seconds wasted.
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.
>between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform.
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.
I don’t feel their stance is “I’m not getting enough attention and it’s all Musk’s fault and I’m leaving”.
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
If that was really true, they wouldn't make a big post about why they are leaving, they would just turn off the lights and go elsewhere.
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.
However if you view your content as valuable and the algorithm does not anymore, it's probably not the best platform for you to be on.
Any chance they keep an RSS?
Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU
I honestly enjoyed the article and agree with their move but I did have a chuckle reading all the way through and then see g right there under the article the X social media sharing icon.
I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
I cancelled my X subscription this month, despite them trying to offer me a lower price. The platform is a mixture of bots and people fighting over how many followers they are getting. I tried to find interesting groups actually making things and sharing with each other, but they don't exist IMO. Most said groups are ran by a few "elites" and then the strategy for anyone else is to do the "engagement bro" garbage - posting for the sake of posting - and overall the platform seems dead I'm the ways that matter to me.
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.
My first thought was that 5-10 posts a day is just too much. Can't expect everyone to read everything and also react to each one.
I don't use social media at all, unless you count HN as such.
I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
I closed my X account Tuesday evening after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Something just snapped finally and I realized there’s no value in monitoring the situation and all these accounts are just monetizing my energy and attention with no value provided.
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.
You're keeping Reddit of all places? If you want a net win for attention and value, Reddit ain't it.
Reddit is a lot of different things and places. Some subreddit are basically PhpBB forums of old. Though now that discord seemingly took over, most of the closed communities i was part of went there, i don't think i connect more than once a month on average.
Reddit has been decreasing in quality for years, and especially since 2023. But it's compartmentalized by subreddit, and some subreddits have degraded more slowly than the rest of the site. You can still follow these subreddits through RSS, and old.reddit can still be navigated without JavaScript.
AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
I don’t follow any of the main subs, just niche interest ones that don’t have an alternative. I might try building up a community on Lemming, but there’s just very little activity there right now.
Regarding YouTube, I can’t recommend enough turning off your history (even the front page is gone, it’s glorious) and subscribing only to select creators via RSS. I only see what I want to see, from creators I care about. Recommendations on the right side are always relevant to the video I just watched.
Oh thanks, I didn't know you could do that. I do like the front page recommendations sometimes but maybe I'll try this
How the hell is this comment shadowed? It's 100% true.
Good. Now leave TikTok and Facebook as well. People who care will find out what you are up to, and people who don't won't see you on social media anyway.
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.
Personally I don’t use it for anything I can find pretty much everywhere else as well, but there are still a few people whose posts I consider interesting that only post on X.
I wonder if the message of eff doesn’t resonate with the younger generation who did not see the OS wars first hand and instead always saw Microsoft as a cloud provider and Apple and Google as the OS providers.
Some context.
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.
BlueSky and Mastodon are much smaller than Twitter/X, and they're staying on the platforms, so this is a moot point.
BlueSky and Mastodon are both open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed. It makes perfect sense for the EFF to remain on platforms which are aligned with their goals. This is like criticizing them for dropping Microsoft Word but still using Libre Office.
Smaller platforms with more engagement? Entirely possible they reach more people on those platforms.
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.
That's fine, but I'm never joining Bluesky. Possibly the most disgusting echo chamber I've ever encountered in social media.
They make valid suggestions on improvements for X. Unfortunately, they undercut their credibility by complaining that their tweets don't get seen as often anymore. Sounds like sour grapes from a group that thinks they deserve special treatment.
Community notes has done so much to help obvious and blatantly false information on X. I can't believe that instagram and other platforms haven't implanted it yet.
Instagram has a community notes function.
Understandable on ideology standpoint. But my take is that numbers are indicating that people stop caring about EFF.
I applaud the move. It's also a little disingenuous to talk about moral standings when the third opening sentence is "The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." If the numbers were working out, would they continue to turn a blind eye on the privacy tracking?
So they're still getting a million impressions s month, and that's not interesting Anyway, putting something up on Instagram and then also on X - that's pretty low effort, no? Weird decision...
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...
Ahh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p
The "de minimis" at the end is a pretty sick burn.
Oh. That X (not x11). Makes sense
Elon is a grumpy old bastard now. That’s all he is, really.
Their decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out.
> 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.
Doesn't X have the things they asked for? end to end message encryption community notes open source algorithm
What about the marginalized people organizing on X? They don't deserve EFF
> Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
... 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.
I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term.
Twitter does have a significant amount of racist content, the antisemitism comment is interesting, because while it does exist, at least in my experience twitter seems to be the most supportive platform on Jewish and Israeli issues at the moment.
> [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.
I appreciate you and other industry professionals taking a stand. The silence from so many of our colleagues is deafening.
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.
Weird. I've shifted more and more of my social media use to X. Especially the last few weeks have been great with Artemis and an algorithmic accident that X's auto translation feature has been enabling tons of positive cross cultural communication with people from Japan. It's more fun than I've ever had on social media. Reddit on the other hand has been completely dying.
you could just post less or use it for major updates.
This tragism and pathos of it is almost comical. A wounded Twitter warrior heavily sitting in his chair, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve of his blood-stained shirt. "I'll keep fighting. Just Not on X", he mutters bravely. The wound being that, apparently, nobody reads his posts anymore.
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.
Coming soon, on a long enough timeline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
The EFF is getting less engagement because they do not make engaging posts. They make a generic and boring summary and then link off platform. This just is not how X works if you want to go viral. For example:
>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.
"The math hasn’t worked out for a while now."
How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
I read “the math” there as doing something a little more figurative. It seemed to me like they led with circulation figures less because they care about their CPM efficiency or whatever, and more to use “views” as a kind of synechdoche for “the people who want to hear what we have to say.”
They're an advocacy organization. They should want people who don't want to hear what they have to say to hear what they have to say.
Brand reputation from staying on Twitter is part of the math.
How could you possibly lose reputation from that?
They lose credibility within their extremely narrow in-group.
Tweeting is easy. Managing the weirdos that respond to your tweets is hard.
I think they have it set so that only followers can respond. Prevents most of the horrible stuff, but also downgrades you on the X algorithm. At least there are no weirdo's on the other social media platforms :-)
What a joke. Eff complains that Musk threw out the previous censors. It's been well documented they were censoring in bad faith. Effectively the Eff wants the bad censors re-installed.
Godwin
closed my Twitter/X account when Elon bought it. I was an early adopter of Twitter and a heavy user prior to that (in consuming if not posting). But it turns out I don't miss it. Freed up time (to read HN, LOL).
So uh, could impressions decrease across the board, not only on X. Like, social platforms have peaked years ago and the downward trend is completely organic.
We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
I wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality.
"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.
And downvoted to pieces. HN is such a cool place for dialogue!
People still on Twitter have the same energy as the last guy at a house party who won’t leave. The lights are on, the host is asleep, and you’re in the kitchen trying to one-up a drunk stranger on Kierkegaard to impress a girl who’s clearly not going home with either of you.
"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
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".
I have to say the reason EFF gives for completely avoiding any posts on X seems somewhat disingenuous. If they don't see their presence as endorsement, then - it isn't a dichotomy between "incessant tweeting all day every day" and "never tweet anything". In this post they said:
> 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.
Leading out with "The numbers aren't working out" is a bit disingenuous. If they were "working out", would you continue to stay? If the answer is "no", then just remove the numbers talking point in your justification altogether.
More should follow them. That website is a complete cesspool at this point and if you're not noticing it I worry about how it's gonna effect your psychological wellbeing later in life. The internet is bad enough as it is, but that site is at another degree of awful.
While I agree with where the EFF is generally coming from, it would make much more sense to just syndicate posts from a libre solution. They could even do adversarial interoperability things. Imagine something akin to a Matrix bridge such that replies on Xitter show up on Masto or some other libre protocol solution, so they (and others) can engage with replies right in the libre ecosystem. Or perhaps every nth of their xits not being the original post verbatim, but rather a link directing people to a web implementation of the libre solution with links to go deeper into that ecosystem. This type of thing would be perfectly in line with the EFF's goals. And not being able to get it together to do even this much is quite sad.
Disappointed with this blatantly partisan manoeuvre by a foundation like EFF.
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)
How is X even still a thing. I left a few years ago and didn’t even think I was early. Baffling how EFF has supported a person like Elon Musk for this long and not went all in on Mastodon. ”The math isn’t working out”? Such a cold message. Is this just about an equation? The last I expected to hear from EFF. Maybe from an influencer, but EFF?
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.
Nothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).
That too would very likely be seen as deeply political.
After reading about Wayland for 10 (?) years and thinking it was some huge deal, I finally took the leap as I was redoing my window manager anyway and it was quite easy (at least on NixOS). Heck virt-viewer (one of my main apps) is still running under Xwayland because the performance seems better.
10 years ago Wayland was in much worse state. It started being good in the last few years, though some features are still lacking.
Oh for sure. The point is the way I hear it talked about even today is as if it's going to be really great at some point in the future, but involves a lot of off-the-beaten-path tinkering if you want to use it right now. But there really wasn't much tinkering!
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.
The only reason why I'm not running Wayland on my Framework laptop is that there's some really weird bug where it hardlocks the system, and after I force-reboot it, the audio chip doesn't come back up unless I drain or unplug the battery. X11 doesn't have this issue.
Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.
Whenever I see X used, I wonder if the author will return to replace the variable with the actual name.
I was thinking of X11 as well, but did not feel old - until I read your text. ;)
My favourite microblogging platform is way.land
You're aging well
Probably more reasonable.
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
It would be ironic if Xorg launched a twitter competitor using a custom update protocol (an X extension) over the network and TCL
knowing how xorg currently operates (it doesn't, it has a successor) it'd be a wayland protocol negotiated over dbus and mainly opposed by the GNOME people
My first thought was "so they go commandline now?". Because X for me is still "the graphical interface".
X11? What is that, one of Musk's children?
I remember being dazzled by Xeyes.
I had the exact same experience.
I get really really tired at the back and forth with Wayland and all that, but I would put up with reading rants about windowing systems everyday if it meant I never had to think about this X again.
I feel I am grateful that I never used social media even when they were cool and fun, I always thought it’s vanity “farming”, except now it’s some people’s full time jobs in grifting and being edgy just to farm impressions aka money. Social media is ruined because of monetization, it tapped onto the oldest vulnerability in humanity: greed.
Where is the EFF, what have you done with it?
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.
Gross and performative, and I say this as someone who detests X and has never used it... when they were writing this crap they could have instead been writing about the ridiculous operating system user age validation laws.
EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws (December 10, 2025)
~ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verifica...
This is regarding the porn site/social media age gating. Not the obligations on operating systems and open source developers. No mention of the california law, or Colorado law-- not on the page you linked or the hub it links to.
I've previously written to the EFF on it with no response.
Very nice, Twitter/X feels like one of those things we keep doing out of inertia, like using Axios to download in javascript.
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.
Leave today
Doing short form updates on BlueSky, but that is the worst algorithmic feed I have ever experienced in my life. I gave it some data. I indicated I didn't want to see some posts. The self-selection of the overall audience is overwhelmingly strong. No matter what I do to shape my engagement, all I get is Rachel Maddow in my feed.
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.
> an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago
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.
My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology.
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.
I live in Idaho I know loads of people and family who I would have bet would reject what is happening in today’s Republican Party but man was I wrong. With very few exceptions they gobble it up.
North Idaho specifically has been a hub for white power movements for a while: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/mar/27/north-idaho-an...
Yes. In the 90's in particular. I'm old and I was in Idaho at the time. What I remember, and I try in vain to remind my conservative family and friends, is that both parties wanted that shit rode out of town on a rail back then. It is now the dominant world view in Idaho conservative politics. I will point to the "accomplishments" of our last legislative session as evidence.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. My grandparents were no paragon of 'racial justice' but did they ever hate those Nazis. Back then, the Nazis were excluded from 'polite society' and had no hope of gaining power through normal democratic channels. That has changed.
> That has changed.
That was changed.
Sure, so did my dad, and Idaho politicians who are still in office to this day. Guess what? They don’t hate Nazis any more. Well, they don’t hate Republicans acting like Nazis. If a Democrat were to throw a Nazi salute they’d be upset about that.
That timeline leaves out the bombs around Coeur d'Alene.
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.
Well. Treasure Valley felt remarkably more WS-ey to me this last time visiting home. The time before that was right before the election, so it feels like it's gotten even worse over time.
If you read Anti-Semite and Jew, one of Sartre’s main points about the rise of anti-semitism is the intentional adoption of a “nothing matters, lol” attitude of its adopters.
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.
This is a controversial opinion, but I do think that there are objectively right and wrong sides of political ideologies.
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.
I could put my signature on your comment as if it was mine, wouldn't change even a comma.
One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:
> 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)
Political ideas don't come in isolation. You cited some relatively benign aspects of conservatism. But those are symptoms of a deeper process, and that same process brings both the benign aspects and the malignant aspects. People's stances on these issues aren't independent. They are correlated by some common factor that causes all of them, and we're not quite sure what that is and it may have evolutionary underpinnings. We call the common factor conservatism (or progressivism, when it's flipped the opposite way).
A lot of it is based in social position / class. People that benefit from the existing ways unsurprisingly want them to continue. People that do not benefit, would like to see it changed.
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.
> I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al
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.
> the 3 have almost nothing in common
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.
Politics is all-encompassing. You don’t get to declare your beliefs privileged and above contestation. We always have to fight these battles.
> I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological"
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.
This is entirely framing.
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.
> 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.
Elon's behavior is truly disgraceful, but spouting dumb shit is not "beyond politics".
You wish to lead with "dumb shit" in framing why people have a problem with Elon Musk? Why not lead with the Nazi salute at the presidential podium? That would more quickly get to the point.
That is a good example of "dumb shit". No one believes Musk is a Nazi, but they try to make hay with it anyway.
You do not have to look beyond Elon’s own Twitter accounts posts, retweets, and likes, to see that he is a full fledged white supremacist. Calling him a Nazi is appropriate.
Ok, I went and looked at his last 50 or so tweets. I didn't see anything that supports what you are saying.
Nazi salutes are protected speech and not "beyond politics". Yes it's disgraceful, and it's reasonable to leave his platform. But it qualifies as "dumb shit".
I think the point is to distinguish ‘political opinions that I am comfortable disagreeing with people about, and can still be friendly with people who strongly disagree with me’ and ‘morally unacceptable opinions that I will neither listen to nor associate with anyone who hold them’.
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.
Protected speech can be beyond politics. Politics doesn't subsume all protected speech.
Well, all of these are politics and ideology. It's OK to have an ideological bent of some sort or other. You can indeed be highly intolerant of those who are intolerant in certain ways. You can hate certain kinds of hate. And you can call out greedy callous bastards wherever you see them. It's basically being discerning.
GP is saying neo-Nazis are "not just politics, but also something worse". You're not really disagreeing with them, maybe just missing their point about some ideologies being worthy of planned exclusion from a civilized society. Aka the paradox of tolerance. That's what makes some political stances "not just politics".
I find a lot of the paradox-ness goes away when one look at such arrangements a peace-treaties. (Or at least, it gets subsumed into a broader set of respective and respectable dilemmas.)
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.)
I view this paradox as just an effect of poor framing. We should not look at it as “I am against intolerance/hatred/XYZ”, but “I want to minimize intolerance/hatred/XYZ.” The first focuses on local, case-by-case contexts, the latter in aggregate. Some XYZs, in some contexts, have properties that make them effective local tools to mitigate themselves in an aggregate context, which is probably a better candidate paradox here.
But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed.
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.
In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas.
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?”
> pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambo%27s
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
I will always remember fondly the story of "Little Black Sambo". I was at that point in childhood where judgement was not yet developed but I could appreciate a good story, especially if fantastic things happened. After all, I was a little boy like Sambo.
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.
It's not the plot/story that are racist. It was the slurs and illustrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
For a long time I thought that was a fever dream from my childhood. Nope. I still can't quite believe that was real, but I personally remember it.
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views
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).
> 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?”
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.
Last year my sister visited me and she wanted to go a nearby karaoke bar because she loves karaoke. I'd never been to this place before.
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.
People have absolute freedom of expression.
"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!
If people get gender-affirming care for their trucks, that's their own business, but no, no I will not eat in a place with a Confederate flag.
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.
It is absolutely your right to express your self by not going to these places.
That is the beauty of freedom. You make the choice.
> People have absolute freedom of expression.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
Yes, exactly.
It didn't used to be nearly as common for owners of midsize to large businesses to be loudly outspoken politically, especially those holding more extreme views. It used to be common sense to keep that sort of thing to oneself, if only to avert PR disaster. Not knowing when to shut up was more of a hallmark of the stereotypical two-bit owner of a crappy local business that perpetually struggled to grow.
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.
That's because they don't stay in their lane as business owner, but use the proceeds of that business (and a bunch of others) to influence world politics in a way that no single individual should ever be able to.
I expect people to be different.
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.
X/twitter is a media company. choosing which media products to purchase based on political values is how it has always worked.
Choosing media producers based on their politics is how it always worked. Social networks are not producers of their content.
I've got a book for you to read...
If I have trillions of monkeys on typewriters generating every possible combination of characters, and then from what they "produce" I carefully select what I want to show everyone who comes to my website, how responsible am I for what my visitors see?
they pay people to create content for their platform, and use their editorial control to determine what gets surfaced for you to see.
how is that not "producing content"?
No, but they decide the moderation policy that incentivizes the content produced (by nature of selecting which users feel comfortable using their product and which do not).
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.
And yet people struggle to get Elon Musk out of their feeds on Twitter.
And yet we pretend he's the only person x pays to post content.
Well, part of the product is Elon's posts and his editorial choices that go into the algorithm. Also your example of the newspaper is also odd, because newspapers were and are well known to be influenced by their publishers and people very often will trash them if they have a contrary ideological bent
Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?
A long and storied history, the abolitionists used it pretty extensively well before it was named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
They know nothing changed. They want to pretend otherwise.
In the past, most business owners would perhaps quietly donate to a party or candidates, but probably wouldn't hang their ideology out in front of people all day, every day. Think about someone like Warren Buffett. He has political views, but they are not something he's out there loudly airing on a huge platform.
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.
This stuff sold well in the 20s and 30s and contributed to the initial wishy washy US response to the start of WW2. Imagine a priest way more influential than Rush Limbaugh rooting for the 3rd reich. Now imagine a rich Afrikaner who doesn't begrudge their precarious social standing.
Yes, but also much of this was due to Stalin/USSR having alliance/agreement with Germany on attacking Poland. Many/most? US leftists were pacifists until Hitler attacked the USSR.
There have always been business owners who shouted their ideology, and others who were quiet. You might remember some cases more than others, and some have had a louder voice than others, but both go way back.
Have there been any so brazen as Musk, who used his influence to infiltrate our government and usurp the congressional power of the purse directly and illegally?
Details are different, but there have been lots of examples over the years. Andrew Jackson had his "kitchen cabinet". There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal, Watergate. There are plenty of other examples. In large part if something is an example or not depends on your politics - people tend to overlook the mistakes of someone they support.
Why should I contribute to the wealth of a man who wants people like me dead? Why should I tolerate others who happily contribute to my own oppression?
It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an observable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has been complicated and negotiated for a very long time.
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.
Probably around the same time as the Citizens United decision. Supporting a business with your money also means supporting the things they choose to spend that money on
Im not sure where your sense of history is coming from. One of the US‘s founding events was a boycott of British goods for political reasons.
Aptly, given Elon's ancestry, did the whole anti-apartheid movement simply pass you by?
First, as others have pointed out, it's always been like that up to a point. But that's not the problem with X.
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).
I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?
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.
Most people hold a set of political views, while also admitting a spectrum of competing views into their personal, financial, etc. lives. For the average person, doing business with a neo-Nazi (or someone who is "merely" neo-Nazi adjacent) exceeds that spectrum. This is eminently reasonable, and has not changed significantly in a long time.
Buying a newspaper has always been a political act
There are plenty of business' products that I use where I'm unaware of if I share or don't share the owner's political views and I'm totally fine using them. Elon Musk has made it impossible to not be aware of his political views by constantly shoving it down our throats.
It is the way they express those views.
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...
Not really. People have boycotted products for political and ideological motivations for a very long time. The change recently is that people stopped caring as much. [1]
You might investigate the origin of the term 'boycott.' It turns out that ostracizing someone's business for political reasons has a long and cherished history. Colt and S&W were targets because their owners cooperated with Clinton's gun control efforts. And to your point, there are plenty of examples of that: https://www.unz.com/print/SocialJustice-1939may22-00001/
Personally I left Twitter less because Musk owns it now, and more because Musk's changes turned my previously tolerable feed into a deluge of far right drivel. Expecting me to keep using it is like expecting me to keep shopping at a grocery store that replaced its bread aisle with a swastika-festooned exhibit glorifying the conquests and exploits of Hitler and his Nazis---even if I am generally apolitical, I will have to start shopping somewhere that sells bread.
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.
When the business owner is in control over the algorithm that determines what you see on the product he owns.
It's not like they are separate at all, the owner is very active on the site as both a user and a god-moderator.
No one would say they used "David Duke's Whites Only Car Wash" but "didn't support the owner's politics."
It's always amazing how much that kind of person will pretend not to get it, and whine about being a pariah.
> To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement
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.
The Body Shop was fairly vocal about animal testing and Ben and Jerrys was famous for their political messages on their products and that was in the 80s. And Levi Strauss and their LGBTQ+ support.
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).
There's "outspoken" and "political messaging" ... and then there's supporting Nazi-adjacent characters.
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.
>But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner?
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
The conflict seems as old as ever. Labor vs union-busting robber baron.
This question is a deflection and I suspect is intentionally disingenuous since it literally ignores the main point of the parent's comment.
In turn I would argue that this kind comment, i.e. an entirely unfalsifiable calumny, is a poisonous waste of space that would best be deleted by the moderator (along with the current one of course).
Social pressure has literally always existed. Nothing has changed lol.
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.
Musk’s account is the most engaged and followed account on Twitter. So Twitter is de facto his global soapbox.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
TWFKAT (the website formerly known as Twitter) is not a product, it's Elon Musk's safe space. He bought it to be his sandbox and to use it to soothe his constantly battered and fragile ego. His own personal clubhouse where he sets the rules, and he's the ultimate authority. You can join if you want to be a part of his cult of personality, but don't fool yourself that you're dealing with a "product" and a "business".
>throwing those salutes
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?
> It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment
He was quite self aware of what he did. He immediately followed it up by visiting a rally for the far right in Germany.
He did it twice and knew exactly what he was doing. The crowd he was in front of ate it right up.
TL;DR
Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
lol what? Still hundreds of millions of users on X.
Apparently not ones interested in what EFF is writing.
"what do you mean there's no more sheep in my field? There's hundreds of wolves!"
At long last. It should be the case with everybody.
Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
bye!
>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?"
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
no one cares
Weird thing to say about an article with over 600 comments.
So many Fascists now on Hacker News. I'd ask how this came to be, but I'm pretty sure I have a good idea.
It is completely obvious that a lot of tech workers are basically evil. They get paid to work on evil things that hurt society and want to not feel like terrible people. See the thread on Musk and the cone head on self reflection.
I'm sure we humans can do better than "everyone who disagrees with me politically is evil"
This isn't about politics, it's about not caring what damage they do as long as it lines their pockets.
Perhaps, but it’s a good starting point, especially nowadays.
I left EFF last year. I was a top-tier donor for 20 years, but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. Leaving X is just another example of it. Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over? Does EFF actually believe that there's more free speech on Facebook?
X is a rare platform where an individual manipulates the algorithm per his own personal political whims. And, yes he is explicitly racist and anti-democratic. No org that cares about freedom should contribute to what is really a personal effort to commandeer the information environment.
The only difference with X is that you know exactly who is manipulating the algorithm (and deciding what's acceptable and what's ban-worthy). And he makes his personal views extremely clear.
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.
Well, consider that the alternative is a _corporation_ manipulating the algorithm per their own _corporate_ political needs. That's really not much of an improvement. Unless you also think that corporations should have more rights to political speech than individuals, which goes even further than the usual representation of Citizens United.
> changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism.
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.
>What exactly are “neutral rights”?
Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.
> Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them
That is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.
They're leaving because the platform because of a combination of not enough real people and elon turning it into a nazi hellscape. The visibility isn't worth the hit to brand reputation which makes sense if you recognise liberty as intersectional
Just to clarify, until recently you were under the impression that the political advocacy organization you donated to had no political opinions of their own?
GP is complaining about a shift from one set of positions to a different set.
GP (me) is not complaining about shifting positions. EFF was fairly neutral for the prior two decades, and even though I did not agree with everything they did, I thought they were worthy of support. Last year, they began filing some lawsuits without much research or diligence, and without much of a legal basis. I waited a while and watched, and I saw them becoming more and more partisan.
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
the EFF didn't move from political neutral. The right just moved more right.
> not complaining about shifting positions
> 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.
Read it as you wish. I would have been just as displeased if they had swung "right" instead of "left."
I didn't comment on directionality, just that you were objecting to a change (synonymously, a shift).
I did not see it as a "shift", because IMHO they were non-partisan before, and now they've changed. It's not moving the line, it's creating a line.
It is hard to someone has been giving EFF >=$1000 a year, every year, for the past 20 years, who also did not consider EFF to be engaging in political activism for 19 of those years.
C'mon. You know what they meant. They are clearly saying that the EFF used to to focus on pretty specific, arguably more bipartisan ideas and initiatives and now it has switched to a much more broad strategy that has strayed from its original mission. Surely, you should be able to understand this pretty basic point.
> bipartisan ideas
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 do not agree that your statements are implied by GP, I do not agree with the suggestion that the reason for that is my incapacity to understand, and I do not agree with the new statements that you are introducing here either.
They very directly said this.
"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.
I can't believe such a nonpolitical organization would do this!!! Come on, you either have to be lying or you were never paying attention.
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...
The EFF has always been against a large political segment, namely the status quo of "long-term intellectual property good, DRM good, businesses have the right to do whatever they want with data they collect, businesses have the right to arbitrarily use de-facto monopolies on computing platforms" which make no mistake were never neutral positions about rights.
In a two party world where one of those parties has been captured by a fascist movement, there is no "political neutrality". You're either pro-fascist or anti-fascist. And if you care about rights at all, including free speech, then the correct alignment is anti-fascist.
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.
People who fight for individual rights kinda have a problem with Nazis. Big freaking surprise.
What's eff?
Double down: Ask anybody in the street or in your family what the heck is EFF. Period.
About time. Other platforms may not exactly be aligned with EFF’s goals, but Musk is outright endorsing the far right and neo-fascist parties in America and Europe.
I've been scrolling for a while and this is the first contact that makes sense to me. Ok, zuck has gone dark, yes tiktok governance and objectives are unclear. None of those companies are clean.
But Musk is actively *evil* and using this company specifically to serve his dark narrative and agenda. Thank EFF for quitting, was about time
EFF: "We're tired of standing in this cesspit promoting clean water, we're just getting shit on us and more turds. We'll try standing in these other muddy ponds and try to get cleaned up and keep working"
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"
But isn't this capitulation? If you're not there raising your voice, who will? I know it sounds like a hopeless situation, but with consistent activism, I believe things can and will change.
The amount and tone of discourse on this post is blowing my mind a little bit. I appreciate the criticism and concern about EFF's justification (it definitely seems a bit arbitrary) and would be a bit pissed if I was a donor. But X is so clearly an actively hostile, botted, and controlled platform. Does the hn crowd really value X so much? Or is this comment section also getting botted lol.