EFF is leaving X | Hacker News Reader

EFF is leaving X

eff.org

1,427 pointsgregsadetsky1,316 comments

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.

> 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.

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'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.

The observation has been called Conquest’s Second Law. It is that common.

I saw this in a comment below yours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...

> 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.

> 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.

Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that

- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice

- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.

So where is the issue that you mention?

You misunderstand my post.

I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.

This reads to me like you are putting effort into presenting your car is sick a way that satisfies your version of objectively neutral. I wonder if that is at the expense of details, because your claims provide no specifics for us to weigh independently.

As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."

>if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

It's obvious to me that EFF should sue every administration. I started working at EFF during the first George W. Bush administration, and I worked there throughout that administration, the Obama administration, and the first Trump administration. EFF sued all of them, I worked on all of those cases, and I supported all of those cases.

As you correctly point out, people who liked each of these administrations were often unhappy when we sued them, and often assumed that we were politically biased against them. I always encountered people who effectively said "my party is using power appropriately for good purposes, and you should not question how we use power; that only helps my opponents". Part of the civil liberties framework and something that EFF has done well (including since the time it's become significantly left-leaning) is questioning how every administration uses power.

So, I'm absolutely not suggesting that EFF should praise or celebrate the Trump administration or not sue it.

> No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

I completely agree with this.

That's the thing: They choose leftist allegiances over their ostensible job. For example, search for "twitter files" on the EFF's Twitter account. Nothing. Blatant government effort to censor people. Zip, zilch, nada.

Now they abandon X that's become more free, and head for Bluesky and Mastodon, which are basically recreations of the stifling atmosphere of pre-Musk Twitter.

Freedom for their favoured people to do what they like, perhaps. But for me and others? Nah, not on the program.

Age verification is a great example. We've seen what Alec Muffett has been doing around this and its telling that the EFF is doing basically nothing.

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 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.

Right wing libertarians and right itself do not support effective policing of crime. They support more violent and unchecked police force. Those are two different things.

Also, right wing in fact moved toward fascism. It is ok to call them that.

I trend libertarian because I have a strong anti-authoritarian streak. I used to think of myself as closer to the Republicans, but these days I mostly only agree with the Democrats. Weird times.

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?

When they supported the legislation called "Net Neutrality" which attempted to supplant the concept of actual net neutrality with some quasi government control of the internet. It would've enabled massive censorship on the internet, something that we've seen is a very very bad thing.

> groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights

Could you share some examples?

https://www.fire.org/

Yep, great example.

not the ancestor poster, but you might want to check out https://fire.org/ and https://ij.org/

Citations heavily needed.

Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.

The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing

How is this related to the article? It feels like you went way off-topic with a person pet peeve.

It's related, because over 1000 comments here are discussing why they are making such a political move (cloaking it as an audience "reach" issue).

You may want to skim the rest of the comments to understand the issue. The X platform is where many conservatives and centrists reside.

I don't have an issue with EFF wanting to no longer align itself with anyone who is not on the Left, but I prefer they just state that instead.

I dunno man, its seems like you were the one that brought up the political slant. I didn't see politics in that article.

O'Sullivan's First Law:

"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...

And that is because the right or the left moves further away in the political space? By definition it seems to be the right-wing moving more extreme rather than non right-wing all moving together towards the left.

Entryism. By definition it seems to be the left-wing moving more extreme rather than non left-wing all moving together towards the right. Democrats have shifted more to the left than Republicans to the right: https://archive.is/IILDt

That's a good way to put it. When the response to "this shouldn't be politicized" is "everything is political," that misses the point. Digital freedom doesn't need to be left vs right. A lot of powerful lobbying groups don't pick a party and will fight within both parties during primaries instead, for example PhRMA and AIPAC.

Note that EFF is a 501(c)(3) and is not allowed to endorse candidates, unlike other organizational structures. Some groups have multiple entities with different tax classifications, one of which can endorse candidates and one of which can't. EFF doesn't have that.

There is certainly a formula where e.g. single-issue PACs will support candidates of different parties who agree to support their issue. One of my EFF colleagues around 2009 (???) briefly experimented with making a separate PAC organization to lobby on copyright issues by donating to candidates (intentionally both Democrats and Republicans) who would agree to support the PAC's legislative principles. That PAC project only lasted one or two election cycles and I don't specifically remember why; I think the likeliest reason was simply a lack of donors.

A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.

Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.

There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:

• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.

• Respond to the speech with more speech.

Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.

It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.

So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.

It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.

The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.

The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.

What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.

[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.

I also heard the slogan "the answer to bad speech is more speech" frequently inside EFF in the first half of my time working there and almost never in the second half.

It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.

I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".

I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:

  It doesn't have to be like this
  All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

I can't really imagine a college student in 2026 having that poster (regardless of that student's political views).

I think the problem with the free speech ideals is a combination of engagement farms (i.e. a room full of smart phones where people “like” or view particular content so it artificially becomes more popular on social media) and bots (which, with modern AI, are pretty hard to distinguish from people who know how to write) which make modern online content a lot less organic.

In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.

Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.

Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.

[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.

First off, just want to say thanks so much for posting your top comment - I'm only tangentially familiar with the changes to the EFF over the years so I appreciate the insight.

> I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation.

I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one (small data point to think about - the reddit r/jailbait controversy was in 2011, and that was when, AFAICT, Reddit first implemented policies beyond "anything except outright illegal speech". I also remember that, regardless of ones opinion on the topic, Reddit didn't really have a choice in the matter - they would have been sued or legislated out of existence if they didn't ban r/jailbait and similar subreddit. I also have trouble believing either the "old" ACLU or EFF would have defended the r/jailbaiters, but you were there at the time so maybe you could offer insight).

But I'd argue that this isn't just some opinion change. One of the unstated beliefs of many who believed in the power of free speech is basically that when people are free to speak out, the "best" ideas, or at least the factually true ideas, win out. I don't know how you could be alive on this planet for the past 15 years and still believe that.

To take a relatively non-political example, look at Ann Reardon, a YouTuber who originally got big with a baking channel but switched to "food debunking videos" because there was so much food bullshit online, and worst, "food porn" makers were hawking cheap, bright videos of recipes online that were inherently impossible while real amazing bakers (who showed recipes that actually, truthfully worked) were having to leave YouTube because their views plummeted in the face of "So Yummy" and the like.

Similarly, take the rise of MAHA, which has now mainstreamed pseudoscience and rejected evidence-based policies. Fine, one could argue there is a lot of opinion baked into that statement, but in a lot of cases some MAHA pronouncements make no sense because they're not even self-consistent. Like the new nutrition guidelines literally say "When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil." Except olive oil, despite being a great choice for many people because it is high in oleic acid, is actually a very poor source of essential fatty acids. There are lots of other BS items I could bring up with respect to MAHA, that's just one that is so undeniably clear that the authors didn't know what they were talking about.

To emphasize, I think the rise on the left of "you're a bad person if you say the wrong things as we define them" is not just a horrible, but ultimately extremely counterproductive, approach. I myself have very little idea what the optimal solution is, but I think technology, with its algorithmic feeds and difficulty that it presents differentiating bots from humans, has fundamentally changed a lot of the "axioms" people assumed with free speech absolutism, and to deny that feels like sticking one's head in the sand.

Because of the asymmetry of energy required to refute bullshit, letting people spew bullshit and cleaning up afterwards is very expensive. And because some people are very bad at updating information in their heads (worse than the average, which is already poor), people will be told a refutation, agree, and later will forget, and repeat the refuted bullshit. And I truly believe they forget, not just pretend to agree with the refutation.

So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.

But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.

People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".

Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.

Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.

Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.

A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.

Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.

>>>Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.<<<

This is a common meme which has gone viral on social media, but it’s actually not true. Read this:

https://archive.ph/20250801101301/https://nuancepill.substac...

“Men outnumber women on dating apps about 3:1. When adjusting for this imbalance, the median match rate for men and women on Tinder evens out, meaning the average woman isn’t matching with a bunch of chads.”

Also read this:

https://archive.ph/20251223030351/https://nuancepill.substac...

“The viral graph showing most couples in the US meeting online is based on a pitifully small sample size. The true percentage of people meeting online is likely in the range of 25–30%.”

> left-wing framing

The problems with claiming something is "left-wing", is that without a definition or clear example, the claim becomes highly suspect or appears very subjective.

Yet another problem, in terms of perspective, is seeing anything not right-wing as being "left-wing". The issue with that, however, is there is a very large middle. Neither predominately left or right, independents or switchers, whose opinions depend on the issue being discussed.

> 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.

But it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"...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?

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.

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)

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. :)

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.

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.

TBH echo chambers are just fine as long as you know you're in one.

I have peeked outside of my curated chamber and the people in there are completely batshit insane. Like objectively not following any sane logic or reason. And no amount of online discourse will not make them change their ways unless they WANT to change.

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.

They're still on youtube with low hundreds of views. Surely video content requires more effort to boot.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Interesting indeed. The story doesn't seem to be radically different on TikTok. It goes up to 15K views, that's still 3 times less than X.

Seems clear while their reach has decreased over time, it's still the highest on X.

I do agree with the decision, but declining reach is not the primary reason, it is merely what got them over the line.

Yeah, the idea that this is simply, mostly or even partly about engagement/eyes is bunk on it's face. I'd even argue it a bad faith position to defend.

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 don't know any X user that I wouldn't describe as "terminally online" and the same goes for the Twitter days too.

Do regular people that aren't terminally online use X? I don't know any.

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

Something like 20% of Americans use Twitter.

Case in point

> 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?

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.

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.

Even if that was true, like so what? Why would anyone care? They are happier over there, so?

>Even if that was true

It is true.

*Normal people who don’t want to hang around in a Nazi hellhole

Twitter: Normal people who don’t want to hang around in a Commie hellhole

BlueSky: Normal people who don’t want to hang around in a Nazi hellhole

> 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

Can you link a source to that 20% of adults figure? I cannot believe 1 billion people use Twitter

> 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.

Most organizations have an X account and announce things there because people actually see it. Most prominent political figures are there as well.

> I suspect you might be one of the "terminally online people"

Depends on what that means for you. For me it means people that can't stop posting and commenting, that have made social media their life. I don't qualify for that.

> you're denigrating as not "regular people".

Not really denigrating, it's more like people that are on alternative social media might already be more conscious about what the EFF is and does, so they're the ones that need it the least.

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.

> 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.

Not if you're shadowbanned

Half this post is about how few people they're reaching on X.

>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.

No that's reddit, Facebook, insta and TikTok.

I love getting on the computer to write stuff like “Twitter is the only website where people aren’t terminally online”

>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.

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.

There was a recent leadership change at the EFF

Since when was the EFF "non-political"?

I believe "non-political" to Americans means not participating in the blue/red thing.

Right. "Non-partisan" might be a better way to put it, but that can also be misinterpreted as officially connected to a party.

It's always been political, but it used to be non-partisan.

Using Twitter in 2026 is a political statement. I don't consume it, but using Twitter would be supporting right wing extremism (or whatever you classify Musk as).

There are tons of famous people on Twitter who I'm pretty sure are not doing it as a statement of Musk alignment. There's not really any other place they'd be.

It's my opinion that the most powerful weapon consumers have is the power to vote with your time and money. Using Twitter is voting to support Elon Musk whether intentional or not.

Yes it is. The people using Twitter despite this aren't doing it intentionally to support Musk, but it does help him.

Maybe, but this is not what they claim in their post. Their official reason is that the numbers are not working out.

And even if that was the reason, that doesn't make sense. They're an activist organisation, their goal is to promote their ideas to people that need to hear them, and twitter users need that more than bluesky users.

Btw. I login to twitter once every few months to share my blog post or report. That's not a political statement.

I replied to a comment, not EFF. EFF is doing the correct thing, but very late. I'm not advocating for one platform over another.

It is indirectly a political statement to use Twitter. You are supporting Elon Musk who has made himself a central figure in extreme right wing political views.

>I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to.

I'm in the same boat - not 10 years, but regularly, and a significant amount of money (for me).

I'm a bit confused now. Their post is absolutely not convincing (for the reasons you outlined - tweeting does not cost anything, and despite what they say they clearly get a lot of outreach there). I think I'll evaluate their achievements with more scrutiny before my next yearly donation.

>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 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.

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.

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.

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?

Blue Sky heavily censors its platform

[citation needed]

No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SnAJOluk1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC64XJl2mXg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhTVHeQK10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRF80IWYX8

Youtube videos are not reliable sources.

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.

The point of these videos is that no platform that values freedom of expression and diverse points of view would have auto-ban systems for the kinds of things that he said. X is massively more liberal in what it allows and what it tolerates before it will ban someone than Blue Sky. So the EFF's claims are totally disingenuous and I don't think people should stand for it no matter where they stand politically.

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.

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.

https://freedomindex.us/us/

Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress

https://freedomindex.us/us/legislators/session/11/sort/sd/

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.

> 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.

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.

Who?

The current administration’s curtailments of free speech go far above and beyond anything progressives would ever propose to do.

What’s the point of lying this blatantly? You don’t believe it and neither does anyone else; who’s it for?

How is that a false statement?

Just as an example, the Trump admin pulled funding from research units that used the words "gender" or "climate change".

Yes, it was comically inept, but it was also legitimately harmful to free speech.

And how about ICE recording the faces of people who attend the no kings protests in order to antagonize them?

Trump being a censorship happy abuser of power in no way detracts from Obama and Biden being cut from the same cloth.

Obama or Biden did nothing even close

It's a completely defensible statement and I believe it fully.

> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.

[…]

> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/?ed...

(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking

(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:

(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.

Search for:

from:EFF "twitter files" on X. Zip, zilch, nada. Nothing about a large government censorship campaign that especially targeted conservatives.

Well if you look at board you see that more than one member served in the Obama admin or directly worked for it at some point.

https://www.eff.org/about/board

That's when I would donate to them, annually. I still have two t-shirts.

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?

I read parent as saying the intern worked for the Trump admin.

yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.

ah, i see! sorry for misunderstanding!

Right went full fascist. Being moderate fascist is not an apolitical position despite being in the middle.

> Nate Silver, [...] made a post about this recently

Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.

It's quite tethered to reality.

What makes it not tethered to reality? Do you have a different chart?

> 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.

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.

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".

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?

Is censorship the only possible explanation for the drop in impressions? Presumably the vast majority of impressions before were from bots.

It sort of doesn't matter. Bottom line is it isn't an effective platform for them.

"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.

What does it take to characterize legit users also as bots

https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/2040909183525048638

The political slant in X is why.

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.

"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?

I don't use Facebook, Instagram & Tiktok. But I do use X, since there the censoring is least on X amongst all those platforms.

Exactly! I love the freedom of speech, and Community Notes are the best possible way to deal with misinformation.

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.

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.

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.

"a bar with KKK memorabilia" is what was said.

It's an analogy. You'll find plenty of neo-Nazis and bigots of all kinds in the replies of any political post, posting away happily to their echo chamber.

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.

Literally nobody that takes this stance around X has or should have political relevancy to begin with though.

X "impressions" are not worth very much

At least half of those are bots.

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.

>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.

X has more active users than it ever has in its history

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.

> "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right

Yes. If.

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.

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.

I think you're confusing "where high level AI researchers, developers, influencers and users converse" with "the intellectual discourse on AI".

The valuable discussions aren't the same as the hype machine.

I would say that their targeting has changed, more than the audience itself.

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)

Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.

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 agree with your sentiment. But if we go this rigid with it, we might find that the majority of humanity does not have principles.

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.

Yeah this is an interesting relationship between interconnected concepts: principles, beliefs and convictions.

I agree with your assertion regarding the degree to which a principle guides behavior. And id probably walk back my original position somewhat, because having a principle and adhering to it absolutely and fanatically is untenable at most and inconvenient at least.

Still, I'd argue there's value in a human engaging in some sort of periodic "principles audit" to take stock of their past behaviors/actions and recalibrate future behavior.

Then again, I'm an optimist....

> Still, I'd argue there's value in a human engaging in some sort of periodic "principles audit" to take stock of their past behaviors/actions and recalibrate future behavior.

I do agree with this. I would call it "introspection" and a healthy person should be fairly introspective in general, either taking dedicated time to consider their actions and beliefs, or continually keeping them in mind when making decisions.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

> Having an extensively curated list

This is key.

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

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.

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.

If it no longer matters by lunch then it never mattered to begin with.

> 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.

> whether it's legit or just hype

> by lunch it's kind of old news

It's hype.

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.

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.

Almost as bad as saying vaccines are safe and effective.

So you got banned for trolling and this is supposed to mean what exactly?

Self proclaimed libertarians always fall apart when the freedom is used against them.

Reminds me of Christians and free will.

I thought Twitter post-Elon was a free speech zone where "comedy is legal again"?

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.

Astounds me that anyone was using the platform even before Musk took over it.

Of all the things he did or said, this is pretty benign

The same as most tech companies treat their employees?

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.

Disagree. It tells me all I need to know about the person riled up about it.

Yes, it tells you that they're normal unlike people who are still arguing today how Musk didn't actually do a nazi salute.

Yes. You are normal relative to the people that are easily programmed to hate on command and ignore rationality.

Ya ya; Musk is such a secret Nazi that he accidentally gave himself away with a wave that used to be commonplace and fell out of fashion after WWII; way before Musk was born. You cracked the code!

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

So he's a nazi because: - he made such jokes as "Some people will Goebbels anything down!" and "Stop Gőring your enemies!"? - He visited Auschwitz after allowing free speech on X upset the advertisers. - He donates to the Republican party which praises Hitler (citation needed).

If anything you're not the serious person here.

> He donates to the Republican party which praises Hitler (citation needed).

Here you go:

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-...

and another:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/florida-inte...

He shard a video of a podcaster arguing Hitler had no desire to exterminate Jews and the Holocaust deaths were logistical failures.

His comments in Germany about too much past guilt.

The never-ending stream of tweets about white solidarity.

Restored white supremist accounts on X.

You're the new flat earther movement.

Your link doesn't show that the Republican party praises Hitler. Everybody involved in that story was condemned by mainstream Republicans. The one elected official was told to step down by the Republican governor of Vermont, and he did. You can find radical voices on the left who praise Stalin or the IRGC. That doesn't mean those views are mainstream in the party.

>He shard a video of a podcaster arguing Hitler had no desire to exterminate Jews and the Holocaust deaths were logistical failures.

The episode covered a lot of material that had nothing to do with WW2 or the Holocaust and Elon never endorsed any particular claims in it. In any case, Elon took down the post and put up a community note debunking Cooper's argument after people pointed it out.

You can find the episode here: https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-darryl-cooper

>His comments in Germany about too much past guilt.

I agree with it. Why should people people feel guilty for the actions of others? It serves no purpose other than to further mass immigration. Elon Musk wants to end mass immigration into western countries which is why he supports right wing political parties in Europe and America. That doesn't make him or those political parties "nazi". You can oppose mass immigration without being a nazi.

WHAT??? lol They literally said "I love hitler"

> Everybody involved in that story was condemned by mainstream Republicans.

lol huh?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/16/first-thing-...

> In any case, Elon took down the post and put up a community note debunking Cooper's argument after people pointed it out.

Ahh yes, the genius billionaire who doesn't understand basic English. That just coincidentally didn't realize he was platforming Nazis. That continues to spread racist bullshit on his X account.

> Why should people people feel guilty for the actions of others?

My point exactly. You're a child.

You're the new flat earthers.

It was condemned by New York and Vermont Republicans including the Republican governor of Vermont. Then New York Republicans voted to dissolve the organization. As for Vance's comments, he is pointing out that many of the participants were young and shouldn't have their lives ruined over this. I agree. People are capable of change, and young people are prone to saying stupid things.

>Ahh yes, the genius billionaire who doesn't understand basic English.

Do you remember everything that gets said in a multi-hour podcast? Do you even listen all the way through?

>flat earthers

I think you are living in a bubble. I suggest you go touch grass and maybe even talk with your Republican neighbors about their beliefs.

My bad. Who among us doesnt "accidentally" share Holocaust denial clips or have to tour Holocaust museums because we keep joking about it or makes seig heils or talks incessantly about preserving the white race.

Really it could have happened to any of us.

The ADL is not a reliable source on this, many other anti-semitism researchers and organizations stated it's a clear sieg heil.

ADL is not concerned with anti-semitism anymore, they'renonly concerned about silencing xriticism of Israel. This became clear when they updated their definition of anti-semitism to include anti-zionism and opposition to Israel. They have lost all credibility.

And AFD is most definitely a nazi party. Just because there are less polished nazi parties as well does not make them non-nazis. They have an ethnonationalist agenda, focusing on German ethnicity as the basis around which to build the German nation state. Contrast this with civic nationalism, the non-nazi liberal take on nation states, in which citizenship is based on a cultural identity and belonging, not your Germanic descent.

Anti-zionism is anti-antisemitism 99% of time. The desire to destroy Israel (as opposed to literally any other country) is rooted in hatred for Jews.

>And AFD is most definitely a nazi party. Just because there are less polished nazi parties as well does not make them non-nazis. They have an ethnonationalist agenda, focusing on German ethnicity as the basis around which to build the German nation state. Contrast this with civic nationalism, the non-nazi liberal take on nation states, in which citizenship is based on a cultural identity and belonging, not your Germanic descent.

The AFD is actually rather moderate. They want mass deportations for unassimilated migrants, i.e. people who don't speak German, don't work, commit crimes, etc. What's actually radical is the idea that you can import those with no connection to Europe and suddenly they are just as European as anyone else because you gave them citizenship.

> They want mass deportations for unassimilated migrants, i.e. people who don't speak German, don't work, commit crimes, etc.

Indeed, wish we could do the same with insular Jewish communities in the northeastern US that siphon off welfare while running fraudulent charities that are basically a way to siphon money from unexpected natives across the country.

I assume you mean the Haredi? I have never heard of them running fake charities but a lot of them go on welfare (in Israel). To be honest, most Israelis don't like them either. But I think the answer is cut off the welfare and force them to get jobs.

Ok, so you're a far-right zionist then.

And on a rational note, you're just writing up an army of strawmen to dunk on, and your arguments are not answering mine, they're nothing but rhetoric.

I don't think I can convince you. I hope some day you realize you're on the wrong side of history.

Or maybe you could just take off the mask fully and admit you're a racist. That would be preferable to this pathetic "centrist" roleplay.

LOL, when will you realize there is no arc of the moral universe; there is no "right" or "wrong" side to history. There is only what happens. So kick and scream about how much you hate Jews (Oh, sorry "Zionists"), but we're not going anywhere.

You seem to have taken the mask off, good for you!

I'm just mocking you.

I <3 israel

Yes, I like you better with the mask off. The dishonesty is gone.

I didn't know supporting Israel is taking off a mask. It's not a dirty secret you need to hide.

Oh no, part of the "just a reasonable centrist" mask is still stuck to your face. It's malfunctioning and reciting talking points. It's out of control!

Quick, you need to do something about it!!!

I don't know if Elon is a Nazi, but given who he support, some of his statements, and how explicit was this gesture, I don't think it's just an awkward coincidence. At the very least, he wanted to create some buzz which he probably finds amusing.

But yes, we can agree that it's not his worse sin. Just adds to a long list.

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.

edit: The degree to which people are dishonest or just unbelievably gullible is pretty astonishing. It's like arguing wtih flat earthers.

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.

Because empathy is a trait of intelligence.

Wow let me just never touch another piece of software whose developers suffered a layoff ever. That's what a trait of intelligence looks like.

> 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.

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.

"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.

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.

> 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.

X suppresses posts from people you follow in favor of algorithmically boosted posts, so at scale the follow counts don't matter as much.

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'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.

This seems completely unnecessary and performative. I have a hard time understanding how reducing their reach could possibly be helpful to the goals of the organization. I'm definitely going to keep donating to them, but I'm concerned.

How do you know that they reduce their reach to their target audience in any considerable way? According to their article their reach on X is about 3% of what was 7 years ago, and god knows how much is bot from those 3%.

Here's my simple criteria.

I'm on Twitter/X, but none of the other social media sites they list (I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, but not in any sort of regular way). So their reach to me personally is diminished. Obviously I'll still go on their website if I want to keep up with their activities and I'll probably still hear relevant news about them though.

It seems to me that you realized at the end that "their reach to [you] personally is [absolutely not] diminished".

Me doing other things to get that same information means that it is diminished.

Well if we're going off of total user counts of platforms, Twitter is pretty niche. I'm on every social media besides it. I couldn't stand it before Musk and I can't stand it now.

These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.

Agreed.

Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.

Not really, their target audience is much more likely to hang out on Mastodon and Bluesky. So even if the impressions might be fewer the quality of them is almost certainly higher.

Fair, their post gave a nod to the believers I suppose, and it's reasonable to assume they have different metrics of success for getting the message out to believers vs as they described "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..."

Having said that, I'd argue that X meets the definition of "walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance."

But, it feels like based on this comment, they should still be on X "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. "

And view counts aren't available on most platforms, but on tiktok, where they are, they seem to have about 60k plays or whatever in the past 6 months. So, I'm not sure how you can argue that X is de minimus, but, gotta be on tiktok for reasons, that also apply to X, but, X is de minimus and tiktok is not, even though we get many more views on X.

Anyhow, with this response I've spent 10 more minutes thinking about this than I should, I will leave it here with the closing thought that their post feels very disingenuous.

Also if you tweet a link to the content instead of tweeting the actual content, you get penalized by the algorithm.

They do this in almost every tweet.

This has changed recently. Links no longer appear to be penalized.

That statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns that they value more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc).

Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.

Agreed. The fact that their Threads account[0] is still active (remember that site? yeah, me neither, I had forgotten it existed until I saw it linked on eff.org's socials page) makes it clear that the opening statement about "the numbers not working out" is deceptive.

You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites:

> people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day

[0] https://www.threads.com/@efforg

You’re a little behind the times, mate.

Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.

DAU for Threads is misleading, Meta seems to count impressions in Instagram where Threads sections sometimes show up. I personally know no one who uses Threads.

> I personally know no one who uses Threads

Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.

That's why I didn't start off with that statement lest I be accused of anecdata which is fair. But it's true in my case. How many do you know that use Threads, especially on a regular basis?

> I personally know no one who uses Threads.

I don’t know literally anyone using twitter and yet obviously people do.

Perhaps what the individuals we know are doing are in fact reflective of not very much.

Sorry but no. I don't care what inflated numbers Meta brags about after redirecting random people from Instagram and counting that as an "active user", Threads is so utterly irrelevant that I literally forget it exists for months at a time because nobody talks about it.

Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.

Threads is extremely ‘normie-coded,’ I don’t think there’s much overlap with HN demographics.

Twitter seems to be more popular in reddit too

https://old.reddit.com/domain/threads.com/top/

https://old.reddit.com/domain/x.com/top/

There's not much overlap with any demographics.

I still see links to X quite often. I don’t think I have ever seen a link to Threads.

I've also never seen a link to Facebook or Instagram but I wouldn't deny they're extremely popular. (last time I saw a link to Facebook was probably when Carmack was blogging there)

freedom is intersectional. it's hard to fight for freedom while supporting those that actively limit the freedom of others, especially when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for

"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with." and the impressions line at the end is basically admitting it was never about principles, it was about clout. you didn't leave the platform because of ethics, you left because the algorithm stopped paying you for it.

>"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with."

That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression

Universality of human rights is a great principle that breaks down horribly the moment it makes contact with people who do not want you to have those rights. Like, even if you're a single-issue free speech maximalist, it is entirely self-defeating to argue that censorious tyrants should be afforded the benefits of free speech. The only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to amass power to destroy free speech.

And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.

Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.

So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.

[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.

"the only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to destroy free speech" says who? you? so you get to read minds now, know exactly why someone wants to speak, and preemptively decide they don't deserve to? that's just you picking winners not defending free speech

and you didn't call every tech CEO a fascist but you did call them all censorious tyrants who operate against liberal ideals. which is a fun thing to say on a website where you're freely saying it. if the tyrants are this bad at tyranny maybe they're not actually tyrants.

That's circular nonsense. It makes you someone who doesn't want others to have speech. It's not self defeating, it's the entire point of defending universal rights, especially speech.

You throw around terms like "Dehumanization" while referencing people you specifically disagree with using names like "tyrants".. without even hint of irony.

Fallacies, like the paradox of tolerance specifically, is a paradox expressly because it makes the invoker guilty of the very thing they justify their actions on. Even as a flawed and useless concept (in a free society at least) it was only ever meant to be used theoretically as a last ditch emergency response. And certainly not simply as means to control unfavorable or illiberal thought.

Worse yet, it's all predicated on the claims that "they would have totally did it to me if i didn't do it first" Which brings up the other flawed aspect of the concept.. It becomes a race to silence the other side first.. Of course that's assuming it was the intent of both to begin with. Not used merely as a tool of political oppression.

That's explicitly not the logic EFF is using; they come close to outright rejecting it.

> ... when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for

> The Numbers Aren't Working Out

I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?

They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they don't agree with.

Because there's enough people there to be worth it

It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons

Was it costing a lot of money or resources to say on X? If they got few impressions what does it matter? You can write the content once.

> Was it costing a lot of money or resources to say on X?

Yes.

> If they got few impressions what does it matter?

Because, it was costing a lot of money or resources to stay on X. Kind of an odd follow up to your previous question.

> You can write the content once.

Pretty sure they know how to write content considering we are reading it.

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t fit with the founders intention.

“We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

Apparently X.com doesn’t fit in that world anymore.

Yes.... because..... "the amount of impressions are worth doing it for"

You can't just ignore complete sentences because it hurts your narrative.

"They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they agree with."

Why would you say that? That's a lie?

Oh wait... it sucks when people just remove important parts of what you say. Don't lie. It's not good.

What exactly has Elon done to limit your freedom? For me, Elon has increased my freedom because I can read about certain viewpoints that were previously censored on Twitter.

Bro. He's still censoring viewpoints. He's also boosting his ideological viewpoints, which diminishes the reach of everything else.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

You are being, and have been, played. What is happening to the left now is exactly what you thought was happening to the right before Elon.

He ran DOGE and illegally destroyed science and arts funding across the US government. [0] He continues to interfere in elections, committing what is likely fraud. He silences viewpoints that disagree with him on twitter and routinely interferes with grok’s training to promote his own viewpoints.

Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]

I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...

[1] https://www.thebulwark.com/p/yes-elon-musk-vote-buying-is-ag...

[2] https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffre...

Which viewpoints?

I mean any conservative view points? Immigration, DEI policies, euthanasia, pro life, gender roles, trans sexuality..

Discuss any of these on Twitter would get you banned, until Musk took over. It still does on many left leaning platforms, including Youtube, Twitch, BlueSky, etc.

HN is the only platform I've participated in that tends to allow opposing view points (albeit more left leaning).

If EFF wants to declare that it's now a Left leaning activist entity and doesn't like to engage wit other people, that's fine, I'd rather they just say that instead and be honest.

You can discuss all of those things just fine, both now and then. I have, and never got banned for any of them.

The problem is online/MAGA conservatives don't want to discuss those things. I've never talked to any online conservative who had anything new or interesting to say about any of those things.

“A man can never be a woman” and “ok dude” got people banned on old Twitter.

Well the first is just plain old bog-standard bigotry. What was the "ok dude" in response to?

No ‘a man can never be a woman’ is a fact and mainstream view. Disliking your sex isn't an innate characteristic and you have no right to force others to believe your illusion or participate in your gender performance.

More to the point you just claimed discussion of these matters wasn’t ever suppressed and then attempted to suppress discussion of them by claiming this was bigoted.

You're denying the existence of a marginalized group and claiming, "there is no bigotry here!" You see that that is risible, right?

People with gender dysphoria exist. THey are not marginalised: they have the same rights as every other person has. It is not bigotry to not participate in their gender performance, because gender performance is not an innate characteristic, as already mentioned to you in the comment you're replying to.

And in soviet Russia you can criticize the government all you want --- as long as you're criticizing the American government.

If we step back from the anecdotal arguments in this thread and look at the actual metrics and independent studies, the "pre-Musk vs. post-Musk" reality is pretty unambiguous.

Regarding government censorship, Twitter's pre-Musk transparency reports consistently showed them complying with roughly half of government takedown requests, and they frequently fought overly broad demands in court. Under Musk, data compiled by Rest of World showed that compliance jumped to over 80% (specifically 83% in his first six months), heavily favoring takedown requests from authoritarian-leaning governments.

On the topic of algorithmic amplification, y'all argue about whether boosting one side equals censoring the other. Setting the semantics aside, a 2023 Nature study found that X's "For You" algorithm demonstrably amplifies conservative content and steers users toward conservative accounts at a much higher rate than a chronological feed, while actively demoting traditional media.

As for moderation and toxicity, the claim that discussing certain topics would automatically get you banned usually ignored that it was generally the manner of the discussion (ie targeted harassment) rather than the topics themselves that triggered enforcement pre-Musk. Post-acquisition, a 2025 PLOS One audit found that measurable hate speech increased by roughly 50%, alongside a significant spike in user engagement with that specific content.

Finally, there's the issue of transparency itself. We used to get highly detailed, bi-annual reports that tracked exact volumes of rule enforcement. Those were abruptly paused, and the reports that eventually resumed are heavily stripped down, omitting comprehensive metrics on things like spam and platform manipulation.

TL;DR: The data suggests that while you are less likely to get banned by US-centric moderation for controversial cultural takes, the platform is demonstrably more compliant with state-sponsored censorship, less transparent about its operations, and algorithmically tuned to amplify right-leaning content.

I don’t think your argument holds, or at least, there is missing data. We have a different administration now, and I suspect it significantly reduced the number takedown requests, maybe by an order of magnitude. I would expect that the remaining requests are for unambiguous legal issues and therefore have a higher rate of granting them.

> freedom is intersectional

What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.

Ah yes, a non-profit reaching out to a broader audience for its activism is clearly a "certain ideological concern" separate from their core mission.

This is the exact opposite of reaching out to a broader audience.

Check out the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, they support anonymity, privacy and free expression:

https://www.fire.org/

Where did you read that in their post?

Because what I read is that their X posts are getting only 3% of the engagement compared to pre-Musk Twitter.

The post insinuates that's because the platform intentionally down-ranks posts for ideological purposes.

Where you do you see this insinuation being made? I don't see anything like that.

> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.

The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization.

Of course they care about ideological concerns.

Where in my comment did I claim otherwise?

You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.

You might be right; I don't know what the broad populace thinks of what EFF does.

I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?

EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.

There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.

I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.

It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).

So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).

Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.

Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).

I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".

Is that correct?

Not exactly.

Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.

And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.

> Not exactly.

But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.

So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.

> if you disagree with me on the other stuff

This part is too broad.

Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.

For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.

But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."

I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.

I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.

People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.

It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.

A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.

Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.

Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.

By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.

The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.

You are gravely misunderstanding my point.

You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.

Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.

Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.

> So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.

By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly

I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.

Funny, how those in a hierarchical system political system struggle so much to understand, hierarchy.

It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...

I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.

You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.

If people are interpreting this is an analogy, that is probably the issue...

> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy

It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.

> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.

But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.

Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.

It's hard not to see this as you just restating your argument.

If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?

> What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?

I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).

Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).

So your answer is basically just...the EFF's traditional lane. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy. Sure!

>Your beliefs may conflict

Maybe, maybe not. A libertarian, a progressive, and a paranoid business owner can all fight against encryption backdoors for completely different reasons; if they team up, maybe they can all get what they want. If they think their beliefs preclude cooperation, then their chances of getting what they want in this area are...much smaller.

> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.

I think that is why, yes.

I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.

This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.

Onboard with what? Acclimatized to what? You reactionary types are always so damn cryptic and vague.

I suspect you're not asking these questions earnestly, given that you then pivot to calling me a "reactionary type".

I'm asking them earnestly!! Why wouldn't I both ask and express frustration??

Insufferable.

Why did you call me a "reactionary type"?

I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!

But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.

I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.

You've expressed a sense that the organization has become “too political” in a specific way (e.g., emphasizing equity, anti‑discrimination, or skepticism of state/corporate power as a matter of justice), and that this is a kind of ideological overreach.

You've implied that digital privacy, encryption, open‑source software, and anti‑patent‑trolling should be treated as pure technical and legal questions, not as expressions of a progressive political ideology.

I'm surmising a desire to roll back the organization’s explicit engagement with social‑justice‑adjacent politics and return it to a more “classical” techno‑libertarian or “just fix the code and laws” stance.

Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy. Any attempt to normalize him—or paint his products and services as neutral—is, in effect, reactionary opposition to a broader societal reckoning with fascist tendencies in tech and politics.

The reactionary position is the one that wants to preserve or normalize Musk’s power, image, and platforms as “just business” or “apolitical tech.”

> in a specific way

In one sense: yes. But in a different sense, if their post was about how they were leaving a more left-leaning platform and they dropped in a bunch of examples about how it was important to support gun-rights and pro-life groups and was alienating people on the left as a result, I'd like to think I'd be objecting in a similar way. (I certainly wouldn't be saying that you can't be pro-encryption without converting to libertarianism or whatever.)

>should be treated as pure technical and legal question

I would like that, yes. I remember being super annoyed watching net neutrality become a partisan issue in real time. I believe that ideologues are always going to exist, but for a lot of us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we are going to play that game or if we're going to do the work to persuade the persuadable and build coalitions to get wins where we can get them.

That's why I chose to be vague in some of my language, because I think it's important to be able to modulate how you speak to different people in service of other types of goods. I don't see a benefit of trying to litigate abortion or authoritarianism in a Hacker News thread about the EFF. I do see a benefit in trying to convince people that advocacy groups staying in their lanes, and that it's good to have voices that try to operate outside the left/right divide in the US in 2026.

>roll back

I get that you're saying that because it fits certain definitions of "reactionary". I don't believe in turning back any clocks, even if I might be in favor of bringing back, in some form, policies that have been dropped. If you see that as a distinction without a difference, so be it.

But "reactionary" often has a particular set of right-wing connotations that I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself with.

From there you pivot hard into your criticisms of a particular person as well as your perceptions about how he impacts the broader political landscape. As I started to reply to some of those ideas I realized that this is all a pretty different line of discussion than the idea that you originally engaged with me on, or even what the EFF said in its own post.

Then you are doing yourself a disservice by alienating people that agree with you on important issues but disagree with you on others.

Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?

My original comment did not claim that they were not ideological and it did not claim that that they do not do political activism, so a reply of "[o]f course they care about ideological concerns" makes no sense to me.

You said the "statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns..." like you were uncovering some hidden truth or gotcha in between the lines here. Was that not what you intended to write?

And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?

IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"

He's saying that they have ideological concerns beyond the ideological concerns you would tend to associate with the EFF (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). I for one am sad to see that this is the case. There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.

That's what the comment is stating, but I disagree with the statement. This is perfectly in-line with the EFF's mission.

Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.

A free and open society is a prerequisite for the rights EFF fight for. We cannot enjoy the freedoms of digital privacy in a an authoritarian regime. The rights to fight for EFFs concerns are currently being threated by the fascist turn of the USA. Thus, the EFF and other likeminded organizations are very much justified in leaving X.

> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.

I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.

Disagree with so much here. But if, in your mind, the US is turning authoritarian, this is a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. They should be taking the fight where it most needs fighting. They should not be making donors like myself question whether we still share objectives.

You are completely correct in your analysis. Reading some of the responses here - people who think the EFF should only fight for some rights for some people and only on corporate platforms instead of across society at large - would be shocking if I hadn’t already seen how willing rich tech bros are to overlook everyone and everything else for their own personal gain.

What are you talking about? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.

Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.

Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.

This is an important point and it feels odd that the entire discussion seems to not be able to engage with it, but on another level it might be the same problem. As a long term financial support of the eff I'm starting to get the same awkward feelings that made me question my financial support for Mozilla and Wikipedia. Any time someone views the world through a single lens, it highlights some things and ignores others and it seems like a net loss to the world that everything is being forced into a being judged along a single (increasingly polarised) axis

Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.

What makes you think they are shrinking and losing relevance, other than feels?

Their post is a good start. The 'numbers' argument is just a facade to leave X because they don't like Elon.

It's just logic. Unless their twitter audience all create accounts on these other platforms, then by default the EFF have both shrunk their influence and lost relevance.

My sibling in sin, I have an EFF tee from about 2001-2002 that reads, in boldface, “FREE SPEECH HAS A POSSE”. They have always been broadly political.

This does not address the substance of the comment you are replying to. In fact, that comment was itself replying to a comment making the same argument you are making, explicitly explaining why it is non-sequitur.

Sad to hear. Can you help me understand its shrinkage and loss of relevancy?

It reminds me a bit of the ACLU. If nothing else, they were always respectable in their vociferous defense of the 1st amendment and free speech. But they got caught up in other ideological battles, and transitioned to a more partisan organization... defending speech they politically agreed with, not worrying about others. Generally, becoming more small-minded.

The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.

If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.

I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.

> But they got caught up in other ideological battles

That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.

Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.

> Leftists

Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.

just not twitter censorship

They also mention that tweets today get far less engagement than they once did.

* _their_ tweets

Right. Those are the only tweets that are relevant here.

Should they care that tweets from NazisRule88 are doing better?

I had the opposite impression, that this decision was primarily economic in nature. People (or at least the sort of people interested in the EFF) simply aren't on X/Twitter anymore, and so it's not worth posting there.

But what is the cost of posting on X? Why do they even have a blue tick?

More than the cost of not posting on X.

That cost should be $0, so that's not the issue.

That cost being $0 would be the most extreme case of the issue.

It lends legitimacy to a declining site controlled by a white supremacist and filled with more neo-nazi’s by the day.

The fewer legitimate organizations posting on twitter, drawing eyes and views to the site, the better.

Its a bit silly to say that they are declining. For its specific niche (mass short form/viral content) there simply aren't any relevant competitors that even come close.

Yes but they say the cost is not worth it due to the impressions they get, not that's it about politics.

What is the cost of posting to X in addition to Tiktok, Bluesky, and Facebook? If it's not effectively $0, it should be.

This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.

I didn't see that in the post. The thesis is pretty clear and aligned with EFF as a non-profit that has to allocate resources strategically:

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

and

> Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.

It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.

They would also leave TikTok and Instagram as well if it would be pure ideological reasoning.

Yes to be honest the "But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" part is not really convincing. It's like they dislike Musk but miss the boat to quit for just this reason.

On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.

Would you mind spelling it out for people like me, generally aware of the EFF but haven’t been following it too closely?

What ideological concerns are they focused on? Imo wanting digital privacy has always been ideological, and to the extent it has ever been part of a culture war they seem to have lost that war.

Another victim of the long march through the institutions.

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?

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 the data it presents is not believable

Because it's completely unfounded unhinged lunacy. Detailed why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714636

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.

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.

>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.

Maybe declining might be a better choice of word than dying.

Threads apparently overtook X for DAUs last year according to SimilarWeb.

Threads surpassed X in DAU only for mobile, with a slow decline shown in X (see plot), with "dying" being a misleading word. For web, X has 18x more DAU than threads [1].

Total daily active users (all access methods) is overwhelmingly for X. I can't find the trend for web. Please post the link you found.

Disclaimer: I use neither.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai...

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!

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.

Nobody is a principle absolutist. There's people who persistently strive towards the goal and there's liars.

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...

"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.

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

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.

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).

Really seems like western europe is sandwiched between fascist trends that have taken hold, diverting their own via brexit's failure - maybe something to do with how yellow vests were received in france too? Sure seems like Europe dipped its toes in the water for awhile and is changing its mind.

Defending my own shared identity, I have to repeatedly mention how bifurcated our society is. We are still trying to get out of the water.

Data backs you up https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/2040909183525048638

Brain ghosts, got it

"Extreme leftist ideology", I actually wish they had that, sadly pronouns have little to do with economic inequality and faulty markets.

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.

Nor on X.

It's 90% debate lol

It's the pvp of social media.

What are you talking about?

Hilariously absurd statement.

Agree on that, bsky trolls are pretty much as bad as twitter ones

"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.

There are lots of tech people in all of those categories.

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?

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.

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 don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?

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.

Brand reputation. Every brand that chooses to use X implicitly supports X, even if they're not verified & paying X money.

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.

Does anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.

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.

I do, yeah. Hope that helps!

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.

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?

https://www.law.com/therecorder/2026/03/18/xai-sued-over-all...

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.

That is idiotic.

> 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.

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.

What is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?

As one of them queer folks, it just rolls of the tongue easier.

It’s just another word for a group, same as people.

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?

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.

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.

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.

If they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological.

Which is fine but just be honest about it.

They're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence.

Anyway,

> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x

Twitter never cared about users rights. Read Matt Taibbi's congresional testimony on Twitter's censorship machine.

Read, was bs, as expected from matt

It was very interesting because it came to light the administration in power at the time, trump, leaned heavily on Twitter to promote what they wanted and hide they wanted hid. Meanwhile Biden's campaign requested revenge porn be removed and Matt and friends got extremely upset about that and called it government overreach (Biden wasn't in office at the time, of course).

Very funny when you think about it, but sad too

You're equivocating. Biden camp and DNC was requesting and demanding that politically negative comments be removed. If you're going to tell a story tell the whole story.

If you’re citing Matt Taibbi as a trustworthy source, man, I don’t know. He’s up there with Bari Weiss for “they’re either intentionally bad faith, stupid, or both” levels of nuance.

These are not serious people.

I not only read what he wrote, I read the screenshots of OG twitter. And what he said mirrored what they said. They were incredibly one sided an censorious as hell. Your post is basically just an ad hominem. A fallacy.

For something to be an ad hominem, one needs to be 1) addressing or responding to an argument 2) by attacking the character of the person making the argument rather than the substance of the argument.

Even though OP didn’t provide them, I can think of many supporting examples for their assertion that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are either intentionally operating in bad faith, or stupid, or both. So this does not at all meet the definition of ad hominem.

Put another way: “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” is an ad hominem. “You’re wrong, and I think you’re stupid because [reason]” is not. This holds even if the person making the argument does not explicitly give the reason.

HN is dead if you find yourself explaining that.

I agree.

For something to be an ad hominem you simply need to address the speaker rather than what was said, which is exactly what that comment did.

You're deliberately overcomplicating things to obfuscate the obvious fallacy.

> For something to be an ad hominem you simply need to address the speaker rather than what was said

No, this is a common misconception. Addressing the speaker is part of it but is not sufficient by itself.

People who are quick to claim “ad hominem!” have been getting this wrong basically forever, so please feel free to educate yourself by reading this excellent post: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

“It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments.

Therefore, if you can't demonstrate that your opponent is trying to counter your argument by attacking you, you can't demonstrate that he is resorting to ad hominem.”

Taibbi investagates, sources and cites everything he reports. Are you saying he fabricates his reporting?

Glen Greenwald is not serious enough for you? He agreed with Taibbi's testimony on the Twitter censorship.

So it's OK now? Or it wasn't OK then or now?

You claim about fallacies later, but this is a also a fallacy.

> Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point

Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.

Please explain. How does this suggest they no longer value free speech?

That’s not what the comment you replied to said.

They said the EFF’s ideology use to be free speech absolutism.

From the EFF post linked to that we are discussing here:

Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.

<snip>

neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:

<snip>

Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information.

You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community.

That very much makes it sound like the EFF values free speech, but only if that speech is speech they agree with.

What about if your anti-abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. What about if you’re isolated and rely on X to connect with your community?

What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?

The EFF used to be free speech absolutists, it’s evident they be taken over by progressive liberals who favour free speech they agree with.

Look in to the history of cases they have litigated. There’s definitely at least some where I disagreed with the content of the speech, but agreed with the right to say it and that the EFF were correct in supporting the case.

>> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.

> What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?

People who aren't young, of color, queer, activists, or organizers, use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day, too. There's no good reason for an organization to have a presence on every social media platform under the sun, but there is one for limiting the overhead you have to do (and also for minimizing social media usage in general).

So because EFF does not post their news in my small Australian home town newspaper they're not free-speech absolutists?

Being a free speech absolutionist DOES NOT mean plastering your speech everywhere, including Twitter. Those are clearly two different concepts.

Also, literally nothing about this says anything about other people's speech. Them deciding not to use twitter doesn't mean you can't, obviously.

I feel like everyone is losing the plot a bit. Are we understanding the words we're saying before we choose to say them?

what are you even talking about? they arent suppressing free speech, they are leaving a platform. this might be the most bot-like response ive ever seen, if youre not a bot then go outside, read a book, just log off my goodness.

They’re not trying to stop anyone else being on X or saying anything there or anywhere else.

The reach and impressions on Twitter are fake though, and posts containing links are suppressed.

(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)

Sometimes it's not just about quantity. Not all impressions are equal.

And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.

Interactions on X are notoriously low-quality and botted to hell, so “not all impressions are equal” might not be a great point to push here.

And not all influential people are Elon Musk or Catturd.

I don't like it and I haven't used it since before the whole nazi salute thing. I feel gross just accidentally following links to that place. Why would I support it or the people who use it?

That's a great reason for people like me to not use it, and I assume for people like you also, but it's not the question that organisations like the EFF need to ask.

No, the relevant questions for the EFF are the ones that the EFF put into their blog post to explain why they're not on X despite remaining on e.g. Facebook, which may or may not be the same as this tweet (I don't read tweets but did read the blog post): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x

Link suppression is contested. Nikita says they're not deboosted. This guy tested it, found evidence they're no longer deboosted: https://x.com/phl43/status/2041893735827460446?s=20

Nikita says they were "never" deboosted, but Musk said they were going to do that and it was a huge topic...?

https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2041911302541730237?s=20

He says here about an interface change. I've noticed this change. The sites are opening in a kind of sub window with the feedback UI still visible. I found this annoying but now I see the point.

The article is honest and open about reasons.

What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.

Citing low engagement numbers as a reason for leaving while continuing to maintain an active Threads account is the opposite of honest.

Where's the dishonesty? Low engagement matters when you have to pay for it. It doesn't cost them anything to maintain an active Threads account.

Their front page says "The leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation for 35 years and counting!"

They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is ideological!

We are talking about EFF. They are essentially an advocacy group, 100% ideological by definition.

It would be dishonest of them to pretend they were not ideological. Staying on Twitter was likely worse for their mission then leaving it.

Just looking over recent posts, the EFF gets more interaction on BlueSky than it does on X despite 1/3 the followers and being on a much smaller site.

I think that says it all.

Plus, even if it did get less engagement, I imagine that BlueSky is full of the sorts of people who donate to EFF.

What does it say? EFF has not bothered to engage with basically anyone that replies to them on X the platform at least since Dec 1, 2025. Searching for EFF replies from older posts also shows that they basically never engage with X users, apart from using it as an advertising firehose.

If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.

It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.

They don’t do that kind of stuff on BlueSky either and do better there, and BlueSky doesn’t have the audacity to demand a paid subscription.

Also, I don’t think the kind of engagement X’s algorithms reward would be good for the EFF’s image as a serious organization.

> EFF has not bothered to engage with basically anyone that replies to them on X the platform

Huh wow, that almost sounds like the interactions on X are low quality and not worth replying to. I can't tell because I don't have an X account and you can't view replies without one anymore, but every time I have seen the replies to posts on X they're always flooded with hate, bots, and scams. Seems like a good reason to leave.

>then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological.

Both Bluesky and Mastodon are open/federated networks, which aligns more with EFF's values. So, yes, but I don't think for the reasons you're hinting at.

"Open source network that isn't controlled by corporations" is ideological, but not quite in the same way that you seem to be framing this.

Yes, EFF is a civil liberties group and always has been, which makes it a purely ideological movement.

Let's be honest and look at the engagement numbers of the post announcing this:

X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes

BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes

Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes

These numbers, combined with the facts that Mastodon and BlueSky are aligned with internet freedoms while X is strongly aligned against internet freedoms, make for a clear-and-cut case that it's past time to leave the platform.

Which internet freedoms is X strongly aligned against?

Just one example, but having to be logged in to view most content on there was a recent change that made it pretty hostile to the openness of the web platform.

You can find links to other criticisms of twitter in TFA:

Interop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera...

Privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/twitter-removes-privac...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/twitter-and-others-dou...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...

Accountability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/twitter-axes-accountab...

DM encryption: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/after-weeks-hack-it-pa...

Have you tried using Facebook, Linked-In, or Instagram while not logged in?

I'm not sure why you're using Zuckerberg's sites as examples of internet freedoms.

TFA mentions that EFF continues to post on Facebook and Instagram.

Surely if you read the article you read the “But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?” section and don’t need me to explain what it said - but i can summarize:

Twitter is un-aligned with their goals, and has dismal reach. Facebook and instagram are unaligned with their goals and are how they reach a lot of new people.

Not super complicated, tho if i am reading between the lines - calling out the numbers feels like a call to action for other orgs. Suggesting they run their own numbers, and get off twitter.

All of them, I think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_freedom

Banned third party clients and interoperability. Use their software to access your data on their servers, on their terms, or get shut down. Hard to think of anything more anti-internet freedom. I left when they did that, years ago.

They would not be able to enforce it on desktop computers, short of banning every user one-at-a-time, but they can easily blanket-ban it on mobile phones by requesting Apple and Google remove unauthorized third-party clients from their app stores. (Which they will do. Apple even lists unauthorized clients for services controlled by other parties as against the rules. Whatever that means.)

Do Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok allow third party clients?

Probably not, and I've never used any of those, and never will. X used to, and then stopped, so I left. Not interested in using a service that asks you to put your effort into it and then tries to turn its control against you. Especially when there are other options.

At the present moment, the X post made it to 898 comments, before they locked replies. The bluesky post has 426 comments.

Yeah, I'm confused. Why say one thing when you mean another?

Maybe I need to re-evaluate some of the youtube people that I stopped watching because they were so carefully neutral, not wanting to offend the nazis, I thought. Perhaps that's just american culture to try to avoid politics at all cost and I shouldn't view it like they sympathize with that camp?

(To provide context, I'm from the Netherlands. I know we sit, ehm, 'far right' on the honesty spectrum but I hadn't the impression that American culture was very different in that regard, at least if you adjust the scales of pleasantries and exuberism to our usual range, which this EFF post has none of)

Edit: what u/ceejayoz said downthread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706961> could be the answer: it is about the numbers, but you have to offset them for how many other people think you're an ass for being there. Nobody thinks you're an ass if you're on Mastodon, you're just posting to whatever server you think fits your niche best, so even if that were only a few thousand views per post then that math might work out to better publicity than ten times as many views and hanging out on X.com

can you clarify what the ideology is and how they are not being honest about it

He means morality, but he doesn’t want to admit it.

Well if you look at their bullet points:

- Greater user control how is any of the other platforms they have no problem with any different than twitter?

- Real security improvements where is end to end encryption on all the other social media? And why do they need end to end encryption to broadcast a message to the public?

- Transparent content moderation wait, the EFF is now calling for more censorship?

The first two points are clearly nonsensical, only the third one has at least some logic. Though if the EFF has turned pro-censorship, I am having bad feeling for having given them money in the past.

“Purely moral” would be a more accurate way to put it.

“Ideological” in this context is what you say when you’re trying to deny that there’s moral dimension to the issue. Which you absolutely are.

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.

>"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.

I still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.

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.

yeah, but twitter is 90% assholes these days

Always has been

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

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.

This is the fallacy. These organizations no longer have any ability to “legitimize” as trust is fundamentally eroded. Leaving will simply remove any engagement with the very people they want to influence- people that are unengaged and people that actively disagree

I don't think Twitter is going to be the place where a revival of listening is going to start.

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?

It would be illegal to post such rhetoric, and I can't name a single social network CEO who's been investigated and found guilty of posting such rhetoric. Perhaps I missed a court case somewhere?

The intentional ellision of the difference between "happened" and "happened, and then a very specific legal process also happened" is disingenuous.

If you have to resort to such tactics to make your arguments, consider rethinking your positions instead.

Wait, you think it's illegal to post something racist online? That is absolutely not the case in the US, and I have no idea why you'd think it was. It's also pretty confusing why you think simple descriptors are "slurs".

It only takes one quick google search to show that he helps promote white supremacist rhetoric:

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/03/elon-musk-nick-fuentes-x-ac...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67446800

Don't worry, there's more.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.

well put. if their mission is to help protect vulnerable communities, and the effort to post on X is near zero ( it can be automated or take just a moment manually), they are betraying their mission to help protect as many vulnerable communities as possible.

That's not EFF's mission. They are not an organization that deals in helping vulnerable communities. They are an organization dedicated to improving electronic ownership and privacy.

At most, X only serves as a marketing/fundraising mechanism. Nothing more. And the EFF doesn't really need to do that as I'm certain their victories and fights will still be shared on X without them.

Advocacy and awareness is one of their primary efforts. And they are defending LGBT and abortion rights . Those aren’t abstract , those are for people

Should they also be posting on other ideologically similar sites such as Stormfront and Truth Social?

i doubt they have any reach or engagement there, so it's not germane to this decision.

Are explicit white supremacy, undermining of democratic values, and morality in general also “not germane to this decision”?

Are you saying that X / Twitter has more of that content than the other platforms they are remaining on like IG / Reels & Tiktok? Because IG/Reels in particular is notorious for that, and Tiktok used to be (but I haven't used it since the buyout)

But then how would I know where to get more regular updates as somebody following them there? It used to be a bannable offense to even link to your presence on a competing side; not sure if it still is.

> It used to be a bannable offense to even link to your presence on a competing site

Huh? This sounds like you mean before elon "free speech!" musk but I can only imagine that, if it ever was a thing, it was a thing after. At some point a competitor's links were being blocked, a little 'oops'ie with 'the algorithm' of course. Facebook also pulled some of those over the years. I don't know about outright bans though, especially concerning Twitter before Musk

I can't tell if you're being satirical or if this is some 1984 re-writing of history, but Twitter definitely banned linking to other social media websites under Elon's rule.

> "We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter," the company said in a statement.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/twitter-bans-linking-to...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/twitter-ban-soci...

You seem to have misunderstood them because they are saying the same thing.

Don't know why downvoted, this is correct. Thanks for pointing it out sooner than I got around to

> under Elon's rule

that's precisely what I assumed

Genuinely thanks for doing the effort of looking for sources and correcting someone you thought was wrong, but the allegation of me singlehandedly (just the thought! :D) trying to rewrite history maybe goes a bit far when I said it was just my assumption and that I don't know of such a thing before elonmusk took over

Performative expression is critical. You need to actually do the thing you believe and if it is of political significance say it and do it visibly. Otherwise there is no impact.

If you do that constantly then people rightly start to write off your performances as insignificant. Everyone should pick their battles because we all have a limited number of fucks to give about what anyone else does.

Not being able to respond or comment to problems the foundation stands for on the most popular platform is... not that

There will not be any impact. + All activism is performative.

I think this is better than having an account with the last post being from 2019, with no explanation, looking dead, and still being able to receive messages from users.

You have to be performative about this. It’s like holding a sign while protesting, that’s the whole point.

Ah yes, classic advice. Remain neutral while the vile humans do not. You must be one of them.

Something like leaving X and staying on Linkedin (and the other platforms) is kinda funny

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120

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 :)

Well, at least they realize they're hypocrites.

Honestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed:

https://x.com/EFF

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:

https://x.com/FFmpeg

> 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)

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.

[0]: https://substack.com/home/post/p-193285131

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.

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.

Coming soon, on a long enough timeline:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

Any chance they keep an RSS?

Yes: https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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 :-)

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?

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?

It's also puzzling that a lot of the comments are repeating the exact same talking points.

- "what is the marginal cost of posting on X, it costs 0$!", which is obviously false. From a labor cost pov, but also because twitter charges for engagement.

- "this is clearly ideological"

- 'EFF is no longer neutral"

It almost seems... coordinated.

Maybe most people here are social platform agnostic and thus EFF's limply constructed reasoning does not make make much sense for a brand trying to maximise their audience. Unless EFF are not platform agnostic and hold some view of the kinds of social platforms they are on. Then this EFF action makes sense.

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.

How the hell is this comment shadowed? It's 100% true.

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

I have a different view: X has been a night and day improvement over the old Twitter.

Community Notes mean that if you see misleading information, it is accompanied by facts. It even uses notifications to show you corrections to something you saw previously.

Free speech is actually encouraged and is flourishing.

Grok is a world class AI tool.

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 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.

Xcancel.com still works ok to read occasional tweets.

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.

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.

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).

https://x.com/martianwyrdlord/status/2042599138227798328

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sure, but Facebook and TikTok are not "open platforms designed around the ideals of digital freedom and control of your own data and feed."

This makes absolutely no sense because EFF is staying on those platforms, so this point is also moot.

It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...

> It's almost like there's an ulterior motive at play...

If you actually read the article you would see the entire section they dedicated to addressing exactly this complaint. But then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?

>If you actually read the article you would see the entire section they dedicated to addressing exactly this complaint.

If you actually understood the section in question you would see it doesn't explain in any coherent manner why they're sticking with Facebook but not Twitter. But if you understood it then you wouldn't be able to whine about it here in good faith, would you?

Not surprised he didn't respond. Facts get in the way of narratives.

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.

> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes

Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok

They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain:

> The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.

None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X.

> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day

I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well.

It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?

> Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition?

That's easy to sustain.

Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456

Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet

To talk to a botnet? no thanks. You can decide to just not feed into twitter.

X under Musk has sustained more government takedown requests.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...

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...

Understandable on ideology standpoint. But my take is that numbers are indicating that people stop caring about EFF.

  > We called for:  
  > - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles  
  > - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages  
  > - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability.

Makes sense. Especially the point 1 and 3 had been long-standing issues for Twitter since before the acquisition, and the situation had worsened since - only except that means to those became successively more adorably braindead.

Are they getting that from Bluesky? Mastodon? LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok? Facebook?

Of course not.

And yet they leave X and only X.

Because those aren't occupied by horrible people. Freedom is intersectional, you can't fight for freedom while indirectly supporting the oppression of others. Sometimes, the benefits of more eyeballs are worth it but there aren't enough people left on twitter for it to be worth supporting

I don't know about the others, but mastodon: yes to all three, since before twitter was bought by Musk. Twitter interoperability use to be good though, but i don't know what they did after locking the public API. Do you have a more limited access to twitter api now? or is it still locked?

Why are you guys so unprepared against someone pointing out that disciplinary actions and criteria for those on Twitter had always been broken? It's obvious that canned_responses.xlsx you were given didn't include responses for that, and that's weird.

Twitter account bans had always been so broken that account bans, account ban evasions, tweet deboosting avoidance, etc. has all, long, been natural parts of life on it, since at least 2010s. I might as well argue that it would not have gone so far "down", psychologically, to the point that its old management would have sold the entire thing to Musk and for people to genuinely believe in positive outcome under him.

The very least you guys could have done it is to recognize the fact that inconsistent, unclear, unenforced policies of old Twitter existed && are not consistent with yours. You guys don't even do that. How even.

You don't seem to be aware of the context of the quote, and you don't seem to be aware of the state of social media.

1. These are not reasons they listed for leaving X. These are lists of problems they identified on Twitter. They did not leave until 2026.

2. Yes, you get better transparency with Mastodons, owing to the fact Mastodons are usually operated and moderated by people with an interest in transparency. BlueSky moderation is also done more transparently (see its labeling system) and in ways that are less absolute (see BlackSky, etc).

3. Yes, you get better user control with Mastodons and BlueSkys. There are third party apps which work well, owing to them having open APIs. BlueSky - Mastodon bridges are common.

4. It's not "only X". EFF hasn't posted to identi.ca in 13 years, Flickr in one year, or comp.org.eff.news since 2000.

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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s

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.

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.

You're taking me slightly out of context there, but my intent was: it's not about free speech. That is, I strongly support free speech (they have the right to be as racist as they want!), but that isn't what this is about: this is about consequences of deplorable (but non-criminal!) behavior -- and just as people have the right to be hateful, we have the freedom to not want to be associated with the racist biker bar that is what Twitter has become.

Ahh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p

The "de minimis" at the end is a pretty sick burn.

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.

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.

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

I guess the downvote means yes but we don't like Elon

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.

Oh. That X (not x11). Makes sense

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.

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.

As we all should. I’m not playing in a billionaire’s toxic propaganda sandbox, neither should you.

Why is your comment getting shadowed. The F is wrong with HN crowd.

There's a lot of people who are really upset that some folks don't like Elon.

I will follow them on linkedin.

Disabling replies on their X post is one hell of a "we support free speech" move. Hats off, guys. if I had not stopped donating to y'all a few years back due to your many other recent idiotic statements, this would have done it for me.

If you seek some other org that still does what it says and fights for speech: https://www.fire.org/

That's fine, but I'm never joining Bluesky. Possibly the most disgusting echo chamber I've ever encountered in social media.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Godwin

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!

I think the sort of person who sees any mention of a user having an abortion fund as evidence that the EFF wants "to push conservatives out of the movement" is going to see everything as infused with intersectionality.

You've leapt to such a strong conclusion on the basis of so little evidence.

> I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.

An EFF that refuses to use any word that you might one day see as related to intersectionality would not be able to do this.

I am extremely pro-abortion. I think that "pro life" laws infringe on the basic human right to bodily autonomy, and threaten to criminalize miscarriage.

I am also aware that many people don't agree with me on this issue, but may agree with me on the importance of digital civil liberties.

When listing three example reasonable uses of social media, I feel EFF chose a needlessly divisive example, due the misguided notion that every good organization should support every good cause.

I want religious conservatives to support digital civil liberties, but if we insist on making it a "package deal" with stuff they don't support, we drive them away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

So fucking dumb

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).

You're aging well

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.

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

I had the exact same experience.

I was thinking of X11 as well, but did not feel old - until I read your text. ;)

My favourite microblogging platform is way.land

Whenever I see X used, I wonder if the author will return to replace the variable with the actual name.

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 remember being dazzled by Xeyes.

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?

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.

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.

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.

The conflict seems as old as ever. Labor vs union-busting robber baron.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Same. From a child’s perspective, that’s what the story was.

But walking into a Sambo’s meant being immersed in the visual world, which was loaded with racist tropes. Sambo was depicted as a foolish child with dark skin and either a giant grin or eye-popping fear.

Again, I was a kid in the 1970s and I knew it was racist.

I would send you a DEI medal but I ran out early, so I'll give you an "attaboy" for "knowing" instead.

This precedes the modern era by many years so unfortunately I was only motivated by basic decency.

But if you ran out of medals you should probably give them out less often. Just a thought.

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.

> 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.

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts

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.

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...)

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...

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.

Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?

They know nothing changed. They want to pretend otherwise.

A long and storied history, the abolitionists used it pretty extensively well before it was named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott

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.

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.

I've got a book for you to read...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

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"?

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.

>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

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).

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".

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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

Buying a newspaper has always been a political act

When the business owner is in control over the algorithm that determines what you see on the product he owns.

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/

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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". 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.

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".

Protected speech can be beyond politics. Politics doesn't subsume all protected speech.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew

If there's a second American civil war, I'm convinced it'll start in Idaho.

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.

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)

> 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.

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 could put my signature on your comment as if it was mine, wouldn't change even a comma.

> 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.

>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?

He did it twice and knew exactly what he was doing. The crowd he was in front of ate it right up.

> 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.

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.

"what do you mean there's no more sheep in my field? There's hundreds of wolves!"

“What do you mean people are still on X? No one I know is using it anymore!”

Apparently not ones interested in what EFF is writing.

Unfortunately it’s gone the way of the ACLU, and instead of fighting for their original cause they’ve become legal brownshirts for the far left. I know lots of folks who were big on the EFF but even my Trump disliking libertarian friends have had an EFF falling out.

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

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

I wonder why this gets downvoted. The goals of EFF are not aligned with those of a platform that is owned by a neo-fascist who is in charge of the algorithm.

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"

What's eff?

Double down: Ask anybody in the street or in your family what the heck is EFF. Period.

Thanks, maybe I can suggest posting here the statement in their website instead of the tweet, in order to avoid generating traffic on X

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.

I am a donor and the EFF post feels performative and political. They still post to Flickr!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com