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Comment by spopejoy | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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

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?

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.

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

The political slant in X is why.

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