Does this not apply to X users?
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
The problem is that people ignore what they said, so that they can argue made up "illegitimacy".
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
The political slant in X is why.
Basically, they can't reach X users on X.
Nate Silver, famously popular (...lol) with the online left, made a post about this recently: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
EFF is, politically, left wing.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
For example, where did the term "freeze peach" come from?
No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.
It's a private platform, not a public utility. They can choose their customers.
Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
> We have assigned pluses to the yeas because Congress has every duty to forbid grossly illicit acts of sexual perversion in the armed forces.
It is full of things that are not what I would consider freedoms. Freedoms of companies to exploit oil reserves is one. Voting no to taxpayer funded healthcare is a good thing,apparently.
Edit: and I didnt look further than 3 clicks away. They are not hiding their political bias very well.
So no, it's not a good start.
This was a bipartisan agreement. Democrats just say "nothingburger" a lot when you talk about it.
The EFF is, and has always been, a libertarian org with a narrow focus.
If the narrative of a platform is intentionally divisive and making them appear left, leaving is the only way to both be center and present as center.
A warped perspective is hard to spot if you’ve been staring at it too long.
Reading their post they throw out every progressive buzz word for the omnicause, they are clearly aligning themselves with the progressive wing of the Democrats. The wing which is ironically some of the most anti-free speech in all of American politics.
If they came out openly as gay as an organization but kept their current stated goal of digital freedom, they still would be a digital rights organization I do not see what driveling about supposed progressive politics makes fighting for digital rights bad.
I guess you can still call yourself a digital rights organization if you want by you won’t be seen as legitimate by both sides of the aisle.
And even if true how does that make it suddenly an organization one shouldn't support?
Is saving one of two arms better than saving none because you can't save the other?
Just as an example, the Trump admin pulled funding from research units that used the words "gender" or "climate change".
Yes, it was comically inept, but it was also legitimately harmful to free speech.
And how about ICE recording the faces of people who attend the no kings protests in order to antagonize them?
[…]
> 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...
(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.
from:EFF "twitter files" on X. Zip, zilch, nada. Nothing about a large government censorship campaign that especially targeted conservatives.
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.
EFF is more like classical liberal. They generally oppose regulation of speech/tech and oppressive laws like DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) but promote things in the nature of antitrust like right-to-repair. Everything is required to be crammed into a box now so that often gets called "left" because the tech companies (also called "left") have found it more effective to pay off the incumbents in GOP-controlled states when they don't like right-to-repair laws, although Hollywood ("left" again) are traditionally the ones pressuring Democrats to sustain the horrible anti-circumvention rule when they're in power.
It turns out trying to fit everything into one of two boxes is pretty unscientific.
I mean, they were, but that no longer appears to be the case.
Does anyone believe this?