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.
Which is fine but just be honest about it.
Anyway,
> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.
Very funny when you think about it, but sad too
These are not serious people.
Even though OP didn’t provide them, I can think of many supporting examples for their assertion that Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi are either intentionally operating in bad faith, or stupid, or both. So this does not at all meet the definition of ad hominem.
Put another way: “you’re wrong because you’re stupid” is an ad hominem. “You’re wrong, and I think you’re stupid because [reason]” is not. This holds even if the person making the argument does not explicitly give the reason.
You're deliberately overcomplicating things to obfuscate the obvious fallacy.
No, this is a common misconception. Addressing the speaker is part of it but is not sufficient by itself.
People who are quick to claim “ad hominem!” have been getting this wrong basically forever, so please feel free to educate yourself by reading this excellent post: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
“It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments.
Therefore, if you can't demonstrate that your opponent is trying to counter your argument by attacking you, you can't demonstrate that he is resorting to ad hominem.”
You claim about fallacies later, but this is a also a fallacy.
Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.
They said the EFF’s ideology use to be free speech absolutism.
From the EFF post linked to that we are discussing here:
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.
<snip>
neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
<snip>
Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information.
You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community.
That very much makes it sound like the EFF values free speech, but only if that speech is speech they agree with.
What about if your anti-abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. What about if you’re isolated and rely on X to connect with your community?
What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?
The EFF used to be free speech absolutists, it’s evident they be taken over by progressive liberals who favour free speech they agree with.
Look in to the history of cases they have litigated. There’s definitely at least some where I disagreed with the content of the speech, but agreed with the right to say it and that the EFF were correct in supporting the case.
> What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?
People who aren't young, of color, queer, activists, or organizers, use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day, too. There's no good reason for an organization to have a presence on every social media platform under the sun, but there is one for limiting the overhead you have to do (and also for minimizing social media usage in general).
Also, literally nothing about this says anything about other people's speech. Them deciding not to use twitter doesn't mean you can't, obviously.
I feel like everyone is losing the plot a bit. Are we understanding the words we're saying before we choose to say them?
Let's be honest and look at the engagement numbers of the post announcing this:
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
These numbers, combined with the facts that Mastodon and BlueSky are aligned with internet freedoms while X is strongly aligned against internet freedoms, make for a clear-and-cut case that it's past time to leave the platform.
You can find links to other criticisms of twitter in TFA:
Interop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera...
Privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/twitter-removes-privac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/twitter-and-others-dou...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...
Accountability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/twitter-axes-accountab...
DM encryption: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/after-weeks-hack-it-pa...
Twitter is un-aligned with their goals, and has dismal reach. Facebook and instagram are unaligned with their goals and are how they reach a lot of new people.
Not super complicated, tho if i am reading between the lines - calling out the numbers feels like a call to action for other orgs. Suggesting they run their own numbers, and get off twitter.
They would not be able to enforce it on desktop computers, short of banning every user one-at-a-time, but they can easily blanket-ban it on mobile phones by requesting Apple and Google remove unauthorized third-party clients from their app stores. (Which they will do. Apple even lists unauthorized clients for services controlled by other parties as against the rules. Whatever that means.)
(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)
And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.
No, the relevant questions for the EFF are the ones that the EFF put into their blog post to explain why they're not on X despite remaining on e.g. Facebook, which may or may not be the same as this tweet (I don't read tweets but did read the blog post): https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
Nikita says they were "never" deboosted, but Musk said they were going to do that and it was a huge topic...?
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2041911302541730237?s=20
He says here about an interface change. I've noticed this change. The sites are opening in a kind of sub window with the feedback UI still visible. I found this annoying but now I see the point.
- 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.
I think that says it all.
If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.
It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.
Also, I don’t think the kind of engagement X’s algorithms reward would be good for the EFF’s image as a serious organization.
Huh wow, that almost sounds like the interactions on X are low quality and not worth replying to. I can't tell because I don't have an X account and you can't view replies without one anymore, but every time I have seen the replies to posts on X they're always flooded with hate, bots, and scams. Seems like a good reason to leave.
Both Bluesky and Mastodon are open/federated networks, which aligns more with EFF's values. So, yes, but I don't think for the reasons you're hinting at.
They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is ideological!
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
“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.
It would be dishonest of them to pretend they were not ideological. Staying on Twitter was likely worse for their mission then leaving it.
What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.