EFF letter to FTC on X consent order [pdf]
eff.org
eff.org
Hope EFF digs itself out of the mud it finds itself in today in the future.
Where does EFF call itself non-partisan, and how is that relevant to Twitter's/X's violations of privacy? Definitions of partisan include [1]:
> An adherent to a party or faction.
> A fervent, sometimes militant, supporter or proponent of a party, cause, faction, person, or idea.
By the second definition and arguably by the first as well, EFF is fundamentally a partisan organization [2]:
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
"Reach" was only ever one reason EFF stopped posting on X. Among yet other reasons, EFF had partisan reasons for leaving X [3]:
> 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.
Them continuing on such extremely partisan platforms like Truth Social for the left (BlueSky) just makes them unsupportable. Which is something I'd thought I'd never say, but that's the world we live in. Where champions of justice get attacked, and censorious hate mills get even officially boosted.
Just read your own arguments. X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
>"previously" fought off censorship demands
This just proves you're either uninformed or lying on purpose. The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
Especially but not exclusively due to the fact that whatever "censorship" Bluesky imposes can be avoided with different clients in most cases and different PDSs in worst cases, I'm not going to pretend that Bluesky and Truth Social are anywhere near the same in terms of speech diversity [1] (aside: nor will I pretend that X has more speech diversity than Bluesky). (In the context of this post and thread, I use "censorship" to mean a company's own moderation and censorship to mean speech restrictions backed by government coercion/threats.)
> X bad because it fires a team they'd never needed to have as a social media company just to stay afloat, especially as it was proven that those firings were tacitly necessary for the platform to survive?
By "proven" "tacitly necessary", I assume you mean proven in hindsight, to which I disagree. You're arguing that after Musk bought the company it had to fire its anti-censorship team [2] to "fix" its money situation ($13 billion debt that banks ended up reselling instead of collecting from Twitter/Musk), even though before Musk bought the company it could have continued on with its anti-censorship team for years without losing $13 billion. You're also arguing that post-buyout Twitter is better because sometimes getting revenue may matter more than fighting censorship (which I don't necessarily disagree with), while pre-buyout Twitter was foolish for more heavily prioritizing fighting censorship over getting revenue. (Aside: Musk launched a frivolous lawsuit against advertisers that was bad for both getting revenue and fighting censorship [3].)
> The furor with which Musk pushed Brazil and De Moraes to not censor people on X was awe-inspiring. Something the old Twitter never managed to do in such scale.
Holding the record for most government censorship demands resisted in one incident, does not make up for overall acquiescing more often to censorship demands [4] or for reducing the company's ability to resist censorship demands [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social#Censorship_allega...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/twitters-monetizable-u...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/27/turns-out-that-advertise...
[4] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
Grok Imagine has been considerably locked down in terms of intimate imagery over the last few weeks. E.g. Harley Quinn used to be one of the easiest characters to manipulate, with or without any resemblance to Margot Robbie. No more. X still serves up explicit hardcore, and Imagine used to get at least in that neighborhood, but that has been squelched. For prurient purposes, nerfed. Not at all limited to CSAM or real people. The pressure they're getting from all over seems to explain it.
Personally, I'd be in favor of banning all sexual content on X, but it really feels like a legislative solution applying to all social media platforms might be the best solution.
And yes I realize the slippery slope that could put us on.
In what country?
Is generation of non-consensual imagery really a privacy issue?
If someone publishes a real naked photo of you, that was acquired without your consent, that would be a privacy issue.
If someone generates a naked photo of you, even if it looks identical to a real photo, it's not your private data.
I guess I live in such an ideal world? Defamation don't require proofs of breach of privacy where I am, only damages. I've heard that this setup is not universal.
This would make cartel execution videos more abhorrent?
Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person? Other than potential second-order effects that may or may not occur like increase in demand for abuse?
I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
I don't really wanna get into a hierarchy of abuse/violence; let's just say they're both bad. But watching a video of a beheading isn't beheading someone. We may have a moral objection to someone deriving pleasure from the watching of it, and we may even worry that without regulation we'd create a market for this abhorrent act, but it's still not the same thing.
> Why would watching or possession of evidence of abuse against a person be an offense against a person?
I didn't say this. I said CSAM is evidence of abuse against a person in a way anime can't be.
> I think it's perceived as abhorrent mostly because it's an evidence of the person watching being sexually interested in kids.
Yup, it's moral outrage. I'm not saying that's good or bad--personally I think there isn't enough moral outrage these day. All I'm arguing is the way we treat people who have CSAM is pretty unhinged, and it's even more absurd when we talk about AI-generated CSAM and like, loli hentai or whatever.
I'd say loli hentai is actually more distilled, visually appealing, action packed and addictive version of child porn, and long term it affects consumer's perception of real-life children in a deeply satanic way, and as such deserves more stigma than it gets.
Wow, this virtue signaling thing is easy.
To be clear, I'm not advocating for loli hentai or CSAM. I'm closer to the ban Internet porn side of things. But it's not because I think it turns you into a degenerate (I'm on a big "please interact directly with more humans" kick lately). While it's true if you're sexually inexperienced you get a weird idea of sex from porn, it's not as though you watch a lot of, say, stepsister porn and dot dot dot, a few months later you're propositioning your own sister. These are the same wrong arguments people made about video games, horror movies, whatever. It's moral panic, pure and simple. And anyone who doesn't think that should explain why it's illegal to have CSAM but not snuff, why it's illegal to generate CSAM but not pictures of people being murdered, etc.
There are of course situations where being aggressive about this can hinder people's freedoms - like an adult who looks 'too young' having their freedoms curtailed because any photos or videos would Look Like CSAM - but I don't think they're common enough harms to justify holding back on regulation here.
It is extremely common in some parts of the world. Age from visual appearance basically doesn't work inter-culturally, with or without AI, and ... there are people amassing something like 1/3 of the world that look like kids until they must retire from all work including use of gas stoves to boil water. Said people just literally look like kids, attracts wrong kinds of the rest 2/3, wrongly reject them if others come over, and gets banned on social media as being underaged, all the time.
edit: I have feeling that the concept of "adults by appearance" might be the case of suspicious discontinuities created by industrial revolution; it is often said that the modern concept of binary child/adults dichotomy is the result of industrialization though the concept of child always existed. For this reason, there might have been selective pressure towards attaining "definitely adult" appearances at younger ages in forerunner regions, and less such pressure at regions that followed it. IMO that makes more sense than assuming people from some regions are obsessed with certain things.
What are you talking about?
Unless of course you're trying to argue that sexualized images of children generated by grok can't be proven to be images of children, because that's ridiculous.
"You see, your honor, it's not a picture of them, it's a picture of their reflection in the mirror."
I feel like this discussion is a question of what the exact structure of the hydrogen-filled blimp should look like, and not a discussion of the fact that THE BLIMP IS FILLED WITH HYDROGEN.
Like we got so deep into the lawyered-definition of words, that we skipped right over the clearly wrong/awful intent.
Perhaps try reading "your private data" again - slowly.
Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image is exactly the kind of lawyer-brained wording I was referring to when I made the comment about the mirror. "It's not a picture of you, it's a picture of a reflection of you."
Your misunderstanding of "private data". This is not lawyered words.
> Saying that the provenance of a naked image of myself
It is not a naked image of yourself.
An image of someone else's naked body does not become a reflection of an image of you just because your face is pasted on it. Object if you wish, but when it comes to privacy, the only possible breach is of the privacy of the body, not the face.
> is relevant to the fact that it's a naked image of _me_ and I don't have ownership over my own image
It is not your image.
In the US, that would fall under Prosser's Four Torts, "appropriation of name and likeness".
The law, currently, doesn't care if you think its a new image. Likeness is protected. Similarity is enough.
If I show you a picture of yourself that is a perfect likeness of yourself, And do not tell you how it was collected/created.
Is that an image of you?
It looks exactly like you, and you have found yourself in a similar or same situation at some point (what do you know your memory is human).
You're saying you can't say one way or another whether or not that is a picture of you without knowing where it came from, but I'm saying it doesn't matter where it came from, it is your exact likeness, it is a picture of you.
A myth. CSAM is evidence of real-world abuse. Grok fakes are by definition not that.
The EFF featured update / press release at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/eff-and-allies-xs-ftc-... links to the letter, with color:
Our response[^1] to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”
[^1]: public interest advocates opposing x petition 2026: https://www.eff.org/files/2026/07/02/public_interest_advocat...
The letter is more interesting than the cover, undersigned by Center for Digital Democracy, Check My Ads Institute, Constitutional Alliance, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety, Demand Progress Education Fund (“DPEF”), Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), Electronic Privacy Information Center (“EPIC”), National Consumers League (“NCL”), Oregon Consumer Justice, Oregon Consumer League, Public Citizen, Travelers United and Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, and drafted by DPEF's Special Advisor Kate Oh (kate@demandprogress.org), EFF's Senior Staff Technologist William Budington (bill@eff.org), EPIC's Senior Counsel Sara Geoghegan (geoghegan@epic.org), and NCL's Senior Public Policy Manager Eden Iscil (edeni@nclnet.org).
They're arguing X is a massive privacy risk and should not get any exemptions.
The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
It's trivially easy to see cases where freedom+justice+innovation can conflict with each other (it's even trivially easy to see where they can conflict with each other specifically for innovations involving the reduction of privacy, ye olde panopticon.)
So it's also trivially simple to understand that at some point you're gonna have to pick one over another. And note that freedom is the first word in that list.
Which is why I would like the EFF to support freedom.
What about the sentence right before the mission statement? [1]
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF's mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
> The EFF's mission statement supports them prioritizing freedom and innovation over privacy.
For as long as I've known about EFF (which is less than a decade, I admit), EFF has never seemed to prioritize "innovation" over privacy. As for freedom, privacy often is a prerequisite.
Basic human decency?
When I worked at EFF we argued in about 20 different contexts that tech companies are not responsible for user activity even if they know that some of it is unlawful in some way, and that tech companies do not have a duty to restrict users in order to deter some kind of unlawful behavior.
We said that about copyright infringement (again and again and again, including before the Supreme Court in MGM v. Grokster), about counterfeiting, about housing discrimination, about distribution of existing child porn, about manufacture of weapons, about evading law enforcement surveillance, and about every kind of tort in content moderation (the intermediaries do not have a duty to prevent people from publishing content that civilly harms others). Oh, also money laundering with cryptocurrency mixer code. And prostitution.
In every case EFF's position was that there might be unlawful ways to use technology but the technology developer or operator didn't have a duty to prevent or discourage it, or to design the technology to prevent or discourage it, or to help the government or private parties catch people doing something unlawful.
I know there are several different legal doctrines in play there and some of them may have limitations in terms of actual knowledge (although EFF usually also argued for defining this narrowly!), so maybe one could argue that if Grok obtains actual knowledge of some improper use that it might have a duty to prevent that use in that case. But it would have been historically exceptional for EFF to say that there was a general duty to design technology to deter or detect any form of unlawful use.
There may also be a distinction in several of the relevant legal doctrines between inventing a technology (or making it available to others to use themselves on their own devices) versus hosting it on a cloud service, where the operator has more knowledge and more control than in other settings. EFF still historically preferred in basically every case to try to minimize the technology creator's or operator's liability for what users did.
The concerns on Grok seem pretty specific: to not take for granted that it doesn’t introduce problems with how Twitter handles user data, not what users can do with it.
From the article:
“These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025.”
Nothing about groks capabilities or what users are allowed to ask it.
> X Corp.’s flagship product since its identity change—a generative AI model called Grok—has created shocking amounts of child sexual abuse material (“CSAM”) and other nonconsensual sexual imagery. X Corp.’s generation of CSAM and other nonconsensual imagery was so egregious that it sparked several investigations and lawsuits, including by a bipartisan coalition of 35 state attorneys general and international law enforcement.
I guess it is complicated by the context that the letter goes on to claim that these capabilities were partly enabled by misuse of personal data (the underlying issue before the FTC here), which leaves open some possibility that EFF would agree that X should not be liable for users' use of Grok if it had been created by some other means.
If it was about capabilities of downloaded software, I don't think it would even be a close question. For cloud services I can see that it can get more complicated, because the service operator would be straightforwardly able to choose to have more knowledge or choose to exercise more control. (But in other cases where the services had a somewhat more passive role, EFF regularly argued that companies shouldn't have to proactively monitor how people used them, even if they could.)
The EFF is not consistent in its principles. It has partisan bias. However, it can still be worth situationally supporting for certain causes.
And they often contradict.
People should have freedom from abuse of their images, your freedom to abuse them
Edit: fixed "freedom of" to "freedom from", thanks to Alpha3031
It gives the ability to speak and communicate without fear of being censored or surveillance (edit to add: and when there is censorship & surveillance it gives helps regain some of said freedom). It supports other freedoms like voting and freedom of association. It reduces the ability of others to harass or threaten or stalk you, making your daily life easier. It allows for whistleblowing against illegal acts of companies or government entities. Journalists and their sources often need it as part of their ability to freely do their jobs.