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.
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.
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 much broader set of dilemmas.)
Just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by revanchists declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders.
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 paradox candidate 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.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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 and making a Nazi salute on live television are very different things). 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.
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).
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.
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.
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]
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).
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.
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/
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
Yeah Elon was my hero for a long time. He had a terafab announcement talk the other day and the concept is very exciting so I started watching it, but I just couldn’t get past the first five minutes because well… he’s a Nazi.
I'm going to assume good faith on your part, and that you're ignorant of specific things Elon has said and done in support of white supremacy in general, and promoting antisemitism in particular.
Elon has frequently lied about George Soros paying activists, and espoused the "white replacement theory", which is that Jews are conspiring to "dilute" and replace the white population.
He has also platformed literal white supremacists on X -- at the same time he has silenced his own critics. If Elon isn't a literal Nazi, he supports ideologies that are 100% compatible with Nazism.
This is not the America I know and love. You must remember that Musk is a foreigner (South African, and did not immigrate as a child with his parents in pursuit of the American dream) as is Murdoch (Fox News). They are in the business of making profits here, and do not share our values. I despise both men, because they did not honor American values, and amplified a minority that does nto represent the America we all love
I'd suggest you dig a little deeper into American history. For example, "America First" isn't a new slogan. It's been used in its current sense for at least a century. Murdoch via Roger Ailes poured oil on the fire, but that was only possible because the sentiment already existed here and always has.
Unfortunately this is true. Around a year, two years ago the WaPo (back before it was a total shill, yes it was still bad but... you know) had an article about how all the rhetoric from the far right in the US was almost word for word what was said a little more than 100 years ago. It was downright scary. Some part of the US has _always_ been that way. Maybe someone can find the article.
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.
Anyone who doesn't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute, I encourage you to watch the video over and over, enough times so that you can memorize and replicate it, then go into work and do it in front of your manager, and see what happens.
Of course, as expected, the Elon Musk Defense League showed up right on time. Does he give out $100 for every post defending his honor online?
I guess we're at "it's your fault for having eyes" part of the defense of the action.
It seemed pretty blatant to me if you watch the whole video, the chest pound and the clear arm/hand extension really makes it difficult to see as anything else.
It was distinctly different from the stills of other politicians waving that often get used as comparison by trolls trying to defend it... when you compare videos the difference is not even questionable.
I think there are better things to focus on about Elon Musk, like his role in getting Trump elected, the misinfo tweets he reposts with "Exactly" and "Concerning" (where the top community note trivially debunks the tweet -- he doesn't care whether it's real), making a stink about the Epstein files until he was cool with Trump again, promoting right-wing slop like Gunther Eagleman, changing Twitter in general like how you can freely say the n-word now, how he went about DOGE, what he promotes vs what he's silent on.
But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find.
That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.
“If you ignore the ways they’re different, they’re the same”
Those are different gestures. Musk is clearly forcefully throwing out his harm, mimicking the Nazi salute. Booker is moving his arm from his chest to a waving motion, using two hands instead of one at some points.
The depths boot lickers like you will go to defend something that is so obviously and intentionally Nazi. Please post a video of yourself doing exactly the same salute as Elon Musk did, with you real name. Oh you won't? Then shut the fuck up.
They are very demonstrably not making the same movement and I strongly feel like it would take someone trying to reason backwards from a predetermined conclusion to see this
>What about when Zohran Mamdani or AOC or Kamala makes the EXACT SAME MOTION?
If they did, they'd make international news for the same reason.
They did not. A freeze frame of someone waving their hand ain't remotely close to the specific "from my heart to the stars" gesture that Elon Musk did twice in a row.
Which doesn't even matter as much as his long, established history of pushing white-supremacist views, supporting white supremacist movements, and using neo-nazi dog whistles (like posting 14 flag emojis at 14:14PM EST).
I can't believe you're making me defend Tucker Carlson of all people, but he's pointing out that races should be treated equally. (Apparently in response to someone's statement he considered racist? I don't know or care enough to find out.)
But at least I see where you're making the connection to the phrase "white homeland" even though neither of the people involved are calling for that. Thanks for the link.
I know exactly how my grandparents would've reacted because I've seen it first-hand, and it's ugly and carries precisely zero validity. It's not to be emulated any more than someone who was born in 1850's skepticism towards automobiles and airplanes is.
You can call it white nationalism if you like but you are spouting the exact same talking points as white supremacists, you just prefer to buy it under a different brand.
What exactly would happen according to you? The state in question got more Mexicans or South Americans which are also descendants of European colonists? Almost every American have European heritage. In my opinion this doesn't make much sense for Americans.
There's no 'white' culture, there is modern North American culture and it's not something that belongs to a particular complexion. It's norms and traditions. These aren't remotely under threat of extinction from 'race mixing.'
The things that are under threat are the contemporary cultural values of openness and acceptance of other cultures/relgions/traits. These are truly valuable, positive aspects that stand out in contemporary American and European societies, and these are the things that are legitimately under threat, ironically, by those who attempt to normalize racism and xenophobia.
USA has a long history of erasing culture. If there is a lack of “white” culture it’s more the fault of other white people not “woke” culture. EVERYTIME there’s a new ethnic minority in USA they’re forced to assimilate through persecution and through the school systems.
White Americans descend from a number of cultures that voluntarily moved here and involve food that thinks pepper is spicy.
Slavers deliberately mixed different groups of kidnapped Africans so they had no shared language and sold their children so they couldn't pass anything on to the next generation.
> 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".
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.
We do not need help understanding why rhetoric like that is ugly.
My issue with comments like this is that they substitute moral sorting for understanding. Their main effect is to provoke disgust, identify the villain, and let readers affirm that they are on the right side. That emotional reaction is sincere.
It also shrinks the debate space for real understanding and real debate, because once a thread is framed that way, disagreement starts to look like sympathy and nuance starts to look like evasion. The tribalism kicks in and polarization continues.
The more useful discussion is what exactly is being signaled here, why it is being signaled now, who it is meant to reach, what norms it is testing, and what response that calls for.
Sorry, hard disagree. Bad faith entirely precludes debate because debate is about updating and improving a position through exchanges of views, and that starts with the ability and willingness to budge from said position in the first place.
Which incidentally means that there is by definition no debating tenants of a position that can't survive one minute of good faith review. They're not there to debate. They're there to drown out and silence a truth about material reality that they're upset about.
It's a useful comment because it reflects a lot of our experiences, including mine. It's more than disgust, it's also dismay, sadness, and (hopefully) a kind of grim determination to roll up your sleeves and address the problem. When systems were working well for 80 years then a group of people who have taken over those systems and made them break. It's not something you want to deal with. It was a solved problem, and it feels like a waste of time. Like a broken sewer system at your corporate hq.
What you're talking about is part of the "rolling up your sleeves" step. What motivated those people to break things for no apparent gain to themselves or the world? Usually it boils down to unmet emotional needs plus a charismatic, ambitious leader who amplifies and harnesses those emotions for personal power and profit. This is one possible, if unlikely, insight that might prevent some damage.
However 99% of the time people have to learn for themselves. This means letting them break these delicate systems and suffering the consequences. Then society learns their lesson for 2 or 3 generations, and forgets it again by the 4th generation. In some cases (Germany) they may have learned it for 5 or 6 generations, but they'll forget too.
It’s helpful to me when the folks that believe there should be debate about literal Nazism speak up. The fact that they are among us and are at all levels of our society is concerning, and the fact they are comfortable speaking up is a sign we haven’t done enough to eradicate conditions that allow this ideology to thrive.
> business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland"
It is not every commenter's duty to cite their sources when you have the ability to easily infer the context and search the internet. These are very well documented actions that they refer to.
Your attempts to drive sentiment through casting doubt are noticed.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? Or is this just like dead internet thing once again?
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.
The linked blog post specifically states that they're leaving Twitter because they have been silenced by the platform and, as a result, no longer consider it a viable communication vehicle. That it's owned and operated by a nazi is icing on the shit cake.
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
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.
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.
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
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.
Which is the issue? That’s he’s censoring, or that he’s sharing his own viewpoints? Your argument that the latter causes the former is not convincing, as there
are plenty of opposing views on Twitter that get exposure.
The fact that my post got flagged (edit: now unflagged) is maybe indicative that the differing viewpoint is the concern.
The first article merely states that Elon has some fairly common concerns, which are amplified because he is popular. It's deceptively framed as if he has the finger on the scale.
"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
What? Freedom of association implicitly means freedom not to associate. It is not at all incompatible with freedom to say, "I don't want to hang out with those guys because they suck."
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
No it is absolutely not. You don’t have a freedom to make anyone else agree with or believe in your views because that tramples over the other person’s freedom of thought.
I think that's the point. The owner of X as well as most of the remaining denizens are actively working on taking away the freedom of others to believe in their own views and make them adhere to their beliefs.
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.
I completely agree. Calling X ineffective when they get 10k views per post there, but staying on BlueSky and Mastodon, where there is no way they see those numbers, is absurd on its face. Meanwhile they are happily on a platform hosted in China and legally answerable to the CCP, so they can’t admit it’s for ideological reasons because how would they explain how their ideology embraces that regime.
It's not even ideological concerns about the platform but about the userbase. TikTok and Instagram have a lot of left-wing people on them, as they've alluded to, regardless of who owns those. Twitter users are too right-wing for them.
I guess? Washington Post and others were doing this for a while. As insane as it was for a "neutral" news source to officially endorse political candidates, it was earning them subscribers. And Fox News didn't do this officially, but it was obvious.
If you want to give EFF more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
It's insane for them to do it and also claim neutrality. They could just be honest and say they're a Democrat party newspaper. Yeah a lot of papers were guilty of this, and those were trash too.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Wow I never thought the org I’ve donated to all these years to fight for digital rights would find the need to use the phrase “queer folks”. What a toxic mess.
I don't see it either, funny how people had a knee jerk reaction without even visiting the thread and validating that the phrase even exists. Maybe it's even further down but without logging in I can't see 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.
Yeah they're not anymore. Woke opinions were getting shoved until that abruptly stopped a bit before Trump's second term. Which is weird because this didn't happen in his first term. Now we've got Amazon promoting the Melania movie.
On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.
Since the person you responded to got flagged/dead, I want to make sure they and everyone else who might think like them listens to this (an hour long, so yay attention span)
"As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor."
One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.
Hunter Biden laptop and covid lab leak were systematically censored on twitter and elsewhere, and twitter was actively working with federal government to censor speech that was neither illegal or against any TOS.
You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."
Of course not. Those platforms have 1A rights. In some cases, the US govt violated those rights by pressuring them to take down viewpoints, hence what I said about "1A violation on the government's side."
In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.
It IS if you want to FORCE others to believe them / abide by your rules and work to pass laws, even retroactively, to limit what can legally be said / done that used to be legal.
claiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.
They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note,
> Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain
groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices
> Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs
With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think"
Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.)
This Hunter Biden shit is a good example. It was all over the place all the time. I don't even live in the US and kept stumbling on people talking about it in social media.
Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political).
Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
Yeah, I remember when the "Twitter Files" were being released and it turned out that Twitter was illegitimately censoring leaked nudes of Hunter Biden. Whyever would non-consensually posted nudes be taken down other than the suppression of conservatism?
> [group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy"
Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
Bluesky numbers are much lower than X for example.
Their demands like "genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages" are not met for many of the other platforms they are staying on.
Then you have lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
It does, but what I'm reading from this is Twitter users are too right-wing for EFF to want to be around them. "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
You clearly didn't read the article closely enough. The first header is "The Numbers Aren’t Working Out." If it was about the audience, they would have switched stopped earlier.
I read it, so don't talk down to me. The numbers are worse on other platforms that they use. And if it were just about the numbers, the article would just be about that.
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...
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.
Even if I make an effort to train its algorithm away from overtly political posts, I frequently see all manner of far-right garbage in the replies, often including racial slurs among other nastiness. That kind of thing existed in the Twitter days too, but at least back then it was at dramatically lower volumes and repeat offenders usually got banned. Now it runs rampant, largely coming from bot accounts posting from south-east Asia and various parts of Africa.
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.
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is it a poor take? Yes that's exactly what I said to do. It's the same as Reddit, I don't read whatever garbage is on r/all, I follow specific subreddits. Honestly people should curate no matter what social media they're on and find ways to stop seeing suggested content; my Instagram shows me only people I follow too, via a third party app/mod.
This would be true if the algorithm changes were limited to for-you feeds. But the larger problem is that the set of people willing to pay for X are boosted in replies. So if that set of people, which tends towards a certain political bias, is hostile towards a poster, that poster will be driven away from posting on X.
The net result is that X shows breaking news, in the same way that the (infamous) meme of bullet holes marked on the WWII plane only shows part of the story - the people who have departed the platform aren't posting, and thus X is only breaking news from a subset of people.
This might be fine for certain types of topics. For understanding the zeitgeist on culture and politics, though, you can't filter your way towards hearing from voices that are no longer posting at all.
I don't care about culture and politics on X, in fact it is something I actively block. By discussion I mean tech news and trends, ie how is someone using the latest AI model or what new project was created, that sort of stuff. The people I follow provide me that, not politics. If you're there for politics then I agree with your point, look elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
This is unfortunate. Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago. [0]
I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
You absolutely need to pop the bubble you're in, because what you believe is the opposite of reality.
There's a reason cryptographers laud Signal (the protocol) over MTProto (Telegram's protocol), and Signal (the app) over Telegram (the app). Telegram is not E2EE by default, does not have E2EE for group chats, and does not have a good crpytographic protocol, and Musk has long been rallying against Signal.
Under Elon Musk, DOGE exfiltrated and breached American's data from the major government agencies they broke into, exfiltrated information to private databases (with DOGE employees leaving with flashdrives), Russian IPs accessing NLRB systems with provided credentials, and we're even seeing DOGE's once-alleged US citizen master-database project come to proposal as a DHS project under the SAVE act.
In just a year, Musk and DOGE helped to expand the US government's mass surveillance capacity beyond what we've ever seen. This is not surprising, since Elon Musk is aligned with the United States fascist movement, and mass surveillance is a hallmark of fascism.
We have a much stronger surveillance state, owing to DOGE and Musk.
This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
> Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago.
There are probably things more relevant about X than what it is that Elon Musk currently proclaims about his political opinions?
Is this the same guy that bought Twitter and then had his tweets promoted above all others and the AI bot a simp for him?
Whats is worse, censorship or that only those with money are heard? Who do you think is doing the dividing and conquering? Not everything is political, sometimes it's just a rort.
Elon is anti-censorship when it’s censorship of racism, homophobia, sexism and the other things the woke liberal left hate.
Elon is pro-censorship for the things he doesn’t like, like the word “cis”.
You can be happy that Elon is allowing alt-right speech, that’s fair, he has brought that back to Twitter, slurs are finally allowed again, truly the speech we all long for, but anti-censorship as a principle? Please. Pull the other one.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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...
Interesting that they are leaving the most uncensored social media site, but saying on the most tightly censored sites. Makes me wonder what their vision for the internet really is.
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".
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?
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.
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!"
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Moral grandstanding is much better then vice grandstanding. Moral grandstandings are good, especially in a world that think being moral makes you a looser.
I support X as the last major free speech platform even though I agree with the decline of X for everyday users since covid, including Elon's reign. But the hypocrisy of EFF staying on other platforms with questionable commitment to free speech and these obvious woke red flags tells me EFF was conquered by leftists:
"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.... Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the apps isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like... Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information."
Obvious political bias. If we can't talk across the aisle, we're doomed.
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.
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.
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 :)
bizarre activist babble - if you want to reach the maximum number of people people, post on all major platforms
if you want to be an activist, take these weird positions
the guy on gab is also a human being with the same number of rights and deserving of the same empathy, freedoms, representation, etc. as the trendy oppressed group on instagram but is generally treated as dirty
obviously i am not suggesting that they post on low traffic platforms, but everything substantial and important happens on x, believing otherwise is delusional
just shows that these groups are not as egalitarian as they purport to be
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.
> 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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I would bet the opposite, Twitter was already a small competitor compared to Facebook and never reached its popularity, switching the audience to the far right likely cut down even more of what was left.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I left EFF last year. I was a top-tier donor for 20 years, but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. Leaving X is just another example of it. Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over? Does EFF actually believe that there's more free speech on Facebook?
X is a rare platform where an individual manipulates the algorithm per his own personal political whims. And, yes he is explicitly racist and anti-democratic. No org that cares about freedom should contribute to what is really a personal effort to commandeer the information environment.
> changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism.
What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right.
What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.
> Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over?
That’s like asking “would activists fight for your rights if no one was violating them”. I mean, no, but that doesn’t say anything. Had Twitter not have been sold but they eventually did the same things Elon did, then the EFF would probably have left just the same. Had Elon taken over but not done what he did, they probably wouldn’t have. The EFF is not on a personal vendetta, this is about the service as it is right now.
Just to clarify, until recently you were under the impression that the political advocacy organization you donated to had no political opinions of their own?
GP (me) is not complaining about shifting positions. EFF was fairly neutral for the prior two decades, and even though I did not agree with everything they did, I thought they were worthy of support. Last year, they began filing some lawsuits without much research or diligence, and without much of a legal basis. I waited a while and watched, and I saw them becoming more and more partisan.
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
ad hominem.
but whatever, lets suppose trump and elon aren't fascists.
what exactly do fascists do?
Oppression of minorities? Check
Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state? Check
Imprisoning dissenting voices? Check
Creating lists of people to get rid of? Check
Authoritarianism? Double check
Creating an out group and scapegoating it as an "enemy from within" Check
if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it doesn't have to scream it's a duck and sieg heil to be sure it's probably a duck or at least not a swan
The saddest part is you slop up this propaganda and repeat it so confidently. What dissenting voices are being imprisoned? What the fuck does "Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state" even mean? Sorry you have freedom as a consumer as opposed to the violence of the state? What minorities are being oppressed? How? What lists of people exist to get rid of?
There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.
ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.
If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.
They're leaving because the platform because of a combination of not enough real people and elon turning it into a nazi hellscape. The visibility isn't worth the hit to brand reputation which makes sense if you recognise liberty as intersectional
The EFF has always been against a large political segment, namely the status quo of "long-term intellectual property good, DRM good, businesses have the right to do whatever they want with data they collect, businesses have the right to arbitrarily use de-facto monopolies on computing platforms" which make no mistake were never neutral positions about rights.
In a two party world where one of those parties has been captured by a fascist movement, there is no "political neutrality". You're either pro-fascist or anti-fascist. And if you care about rights at all, including free speech, then the correct alignment is anti-fascist.
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.
> 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?
Twitter's own first published transparency report under Musk acknowledged they suspended 3x as many accounts (for policy reasons other than spamming) in six months as they had done over an equivalent period just before he acquired it.
That's where you draw the line? Does a social media allow you to dox the owner's location? A true test of free speech!
There are many accounts that show the flight paths but on a 24h delay. I see that as reasonable. It allows you to do view the data but there is no security risk.
Meanwhile people were banned off twitter for saying "men are not women".
Yes, a "free-speech absolutist" who explicitly promised to preserve a very specific example of free speech on explicit free speech grounds immediately banned the account when he was able to.
And then he banned reporters for reporting on it.
It's the easiest possible example to demonstrate his principles were never genuine here.
There was never any security risk, the flight data was and is public information. You should be able to say “men are not women” and also repost public data. Stop pretending Elon cares about free speech.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
YC for sure is, HN should be separated from it and run independently. There’s tons of brigading against any criticism of YC or any of its portfolio companies. Just the other day someone re-posted OpenAI’s post about how GPT-2 was too dangerous to release (in response to the similar recent claim about Claude Mythos), I saw it hit #1 and then a few minutes later it had gotten flagged off the front page.
We all have a different definition of toxic. HN gets really toxic sometimes, but it goes with the ideology of the site, so it’s like nobody notices. And that applies to all platforms, including Twitter.
I see overt racism and sexism posted here frequently.
It's usually couched in sophisticated-sounding faux-intellectual language, though, which is the key to posting whatever you want here. You can say literally anything on HN, so long as you camouflage it with SV techbro vernacular.
I don't even know what your thresholds are. They could be very low, like misgendering something and you see it as sexism - or simply refusing to call someone "they". For all I know you could be one of those people who stand up and call that sexism or transmisogyny.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
What was wrong with just saying people instead of this nonsense? EFF has been a joke for a while now so has every organization that does something for people. It's just a box that can be ticked when someone asks something stupid like "who protects some imaginary rights".
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes.
X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.
> 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.
I'm sorry, you didn't say anything about your reasoning behind your ad hominem attack, so I can't properly evaluate your point. I eagerly await your clarification as to the relevance of your observation with regards to this HN topic.
If the reason for leaving X is a 97% drop in impressions, explain moving to Bluesky and Mastodon where you'll get even less. The numbers argument is a fig leaf. This is an ideological decision dressed up as strategy, and that's fine -- just say that instead of pretending it's about data. As for "ad hominem" -- pointing out that the person making the decision has an advocacy background, not a growth background, isn't an attack. I am providing context for why a "data-driven" post reads like a manifesto.
If you think something like "open source is good" or "patent trolling is bad" and you want to advocate for those things, you should want to maximize your reach and do what you can to demonstrate that these are not inherently partisan issues, because if people start to perceive that the things that the EFF cares about are bound up with partisan ideology, then it will be dismissed as such.
(It's also buying into the narrative that X is a ideological monolith. It, of course, is not. But it does lean a different way than other major social media platforms, which means there's a unique opportunity to speak to a different kind of audience!)
Do you have the API access on twitter back? because if not, it's not like any other. it's more bothersome to power users. I thought people on HN of all places would understand that.
Idk, I have to use Microsoft utilities for work (yay! game development!), and I feel like opening twitter and pasting something is lower friction than trying to do Teams automation.
Good luck, worked on that a few weeks ago actually. Once you get it working though, you can just forget it (that's what i did).
For twitter and EFF, it's a work account, so probably 2FA with a timeout. You have to connect to it, pass the 2FA, then click, then copy paste. Or you can just log in to your tool, and post simultaneously on linkedin/mastodon (i don't know about the others, never used them). If your tool is well integrated, you can also just post on your company blog, and all social media wiht a public API are updated at the same time. TBH i don't really use social media, but i understand the "it's not big enough to loose 10 minutes each day, let's drop it if they don't fix their shitty API".
It just seems like they are unhappy with the algorithm, and like any customer for any service you can cancel service, say why you are canceling service, and move to alternatives especially when your concerns aren't addressed.
Seems like they prefer those platforms and perhaps the algorithm works better for their goals. Maybe they'll grow users over time and it'll be better for the EFF on a post/engagement ratio. Maybe more engaging users are on those platforms? I'm not fan of Bluesky (interactions I've seen are racist and/or far-left lunatics or communists and other such water heads), but then again who cares where they post?
One of their posts that they themselves link is supporting abortion. I am not sure how abortion connects with my right to not disclose information about myself or digital rights.
so... fighting for the exact kind of freedom they've fought for since day 1? Being against illegal invasions of privacy means being against it even when it becomes beneficial to prosecuting child murder
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.
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.
I just wanna remind people that this website is full of elon's drones and bots who mob flagged any criticism of DOGE for months on end. A lot of the "outrage" expressed in this discussion is likely faux.
If you just want to talk about how much you hate the current US administration with other people who also spend all their time talking about how much they hate the current US administration, there are much better places for that, such as r/politics.
DOGE itself is related to technology, but the posts about it often aren't. The ones that at least pretend to invite some sort of tech-related discussion in the comments generally do well.
Elon Musk posts about self driving car technology coming in the next 3 years (for 10 years): very technology related, super cool, straight to the front page! Take my money!
Elon Musk takes effective control of government functions by bribing incoming President, uses power to close investigations into his driverless car technology that is currently running amok on city streets causing death and destruction: not technology related, off topic and uninteresting. Downvote and flag.
I mean it’s always been an outlet of a popular Silicon Valley VC.
As the US sinks more and more into despotism, those controlling Silicon Valley are just enablers of that despotism.
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...
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.
Just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by revanchists declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders.
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.
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?”
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.
"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!
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.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
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.
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
Are you that user that replaces all your comments with periods once enough people flag you?
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 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
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.
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 and making a Nazi salute on live television are very different things). 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.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts
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).
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.
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
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...
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.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
A quick Google produces a pretty good summary: https://share.google/aimode/rL9lSxwPyJaxdFsap
There's also his history of obsessing about race, especially "preserving" the white race: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
Elon has frequently lied about George Soros paying activists, and espoused the "white replacement theory", which is that Jews are conspiring to "dilute" and replace the white population.
He has also platformed literal white supremacists on X -- at the same time he has silenced his own critics. If Elon isn't a literal Nazi, he supports ideologies that are 100% compatible with Nazism.
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.
Of course, as expected, the Elon Musk Defense League showed up right on time. Does he give out $100 for every post defending his honor online?
"It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured."
it's an absolute joke anyone disputes what he did
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-cory-booker-made-sim...
It seemed pretty blatant to me if you watch the whole video, the chest pound and the clear arm/hand extension really makes it difficult to see as anything else.
It was distinctly different from the stills of other politicians waving that often get used as comparison by trolls trying to defend it... when you compare videos the difference is not even questionable.
But you knew that.
But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find.
That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.
Those are different gestures. Musk is clearly forcefully throwing out his harm, mimicking the Nazi salute. Booker is moving his arm from his chest to a waving motion, using two hands instead of one at some points.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/01/02/hypocrisy-on-full-di...
They are not "exactly" the same. There's a symbolic reason you keep your hand flat, rigid, and parallel to the arm, in a salute.
No, that doesn't work here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...
Also, when have they joked about it being a Nazi salute after the fact like Elon Musk did? https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882406209187409976
If they did, they'd make international news for the same reason.
They did not. A freeze frame of someone waving their hand ain't remotely close to the specific "from my heart to the stars" gesture that Elon Musk did twice in a row.
Which doesn't even matter as much as his long, established history of pushing white-supremacist views, supporting white supremacist movements, and using neo-nazi dog whistles (like posting 14 flag emojis at 14:14PM EST).
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1962406618886492245 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2030202550259962338
That's just disgusting stuff. Gutter white nationalism.
But at least I see where you're making the connection to the phrase "white homeland" even though neither of the people involved are calling for that. Thanks for the link.
South Africa's transition away from being a nuclear apartheid state was an objective win for everyone, everywhere.
No, it isn't. It's a distinction without a difference.
Why do you think that makes a difference?
Hint: white supremacy (believing whites are superior).
You don't speak for me, and I find you embarrassing.
What exactly means to be culturally white in US?
Everyone should hate fascism and Nazis.
For most of the past five centuries, the people you're lumping into this thing called 'white' would've considered it fighting words to do so.
The things that are under threat are the contemporary cultural values of openness and acceptance of other cultures/relgions/traits. These are truly valuable, positive aspects that stand out in contemporary American and European societies, and these are the things that are legitimately under threat, ironically, by those who attempt to normalize racism and xenophobia.
Slavers deliberately mixed different groups of kidnapped Africans so they had no shared language and sold their children so they couldn't pass anything on to the next generation.
We are not the same.
Elon's behavior is truly disgraceful, but spouting dumb shit is not "beyond politics".
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.
My issue with comments like this is that they substitute moral sorting for understanding. Their main effect is to provoke disgust, identify the villain, and let readers affirm that they are on the right side. That emotional reaction is sincere.
It also shrinks the debate space for real understanding and real debate, because once a thread is framed that way, disagreement starts to look like sympathy and nuance starts to look like evasion. The tribalism kicks in and polarization continues.
The more useful discussion is what exactly is being signaled here, why it is being signaled now, who it is meant to reach, what norms it is testing, and what response that calls for.
Which incidentally means that there is by definition no debating tenants of a position that can't survive one minute of good faith review. They're not there to debate. They're there to drown out and silence a truth about material reality that they're upset about.
What you're talking about is part of the "rolling up your sleeves" step. What motivated those people to break things for no apparent gain to themselves or the world? Usually it boils down to unmet emotional needs plus a charismatic, ambitious leader who amplifies and harnesses those emotions for personal power and profit. This is one possible, if unlikely, insight that might prevent some damage.
However 99% of the time people have to learn for themselves. This means letting them break these delicate systems and suffering the consequences. Then society learns their lesson for 2 or 3 generations, and forgets it again by the 4th generation. In some cases (Germany) they may have learned it for 5 or 6 generations, but they'll forget too.
> business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland"
It is not every commenter's duty to cite their sources when you have the ability to easily infer the context and search the internet. These are very well documented actions that they refer to. Your attempts to drive sentiment through casting doubt are noticed.
Oh come on. Everyone who's been paying attention enough to warrant having opinions on the subject knows what the reference is to.
But if you just came out of a cryogenic freeze, they're talking about:
1. Elon Musk appearing to be giving a Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration [1]
2. Elon Musk espousing and propagating white supremacist views nearly on a daily basis[2]
3. Elon Musk openly supporting borderline Neo-Nazi[3][4] German AfD party[5]
4. Elon Musk promulgating the myth of "white genocide"[6]
I guess if you somehow missed all of that over the past few years, you wouldn't know what the parent comment is about.
But in that case, you shouldn't be taking a part in this conversation, or opining about what would "infuse[sic] more polarisation".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
[3] https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2024-07-31/frontline-...
[4] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/25/europe/elon-musk-germany-afd-...
[6] https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0lhfn68
[3]
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.
Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
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?
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).
Is that correct?
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.
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.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.
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? Or is this just like dead internet thing once again?
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
> 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.
> The Numbers Aren't Working Out
I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
The fact that my post got flagged (edit: now unflagged) is maybe indicative that the differing viewpoint is the concern.
What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.
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
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
No one has asserted this.
If your views suck, people have the freedom to say "ok, bye".
(Musk asserts otherwise, of course. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...)
So I'm not free to assert moral reasons for my actions?
On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.
If you want to give EFF more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
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.
> 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.
https://www.fire.org/
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
Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.
Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.
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.
Please stick to your charter my friends.
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.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.
https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a
"As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor."
One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.
I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707483
You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."
That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.
Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"???
It was often as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies.
Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.
They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note,
> Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices
> Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs
With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think"
Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.)
[1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political).
Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis
Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
Their demands like "genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages" are not met for many of the other platforms they are staying on.
Then you have lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
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.
(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.
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.
They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is 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.
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.
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.
Does this not apply to X users?
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.
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.
Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.
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.
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
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'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.
The net result is that X shows breaking news, in the same way that the (infamous) meme of bullet holes marked on the WWII plane only shows part of the story - the people who have departed the platform aren't posting, and thus X is only breaking news from a subset of people.
This might be fine for certain types of topics. For understanding the zeitgeist on culture and politics, though, you can't filter your way towards hearing from voices that are no longer posting at all.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
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.
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.
You think those people are on X?
I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
[0] https://nitter.net/durov/status/2041979377773133898#m
Comical.
> It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
How about their website, which is accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to log in?
Sure, just like he was pro-free speech, until he suddenly wasn't.
His broken promise not to ban @elonjet is still up. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
There's a reason cryptographers laud Signal (the protocol) over MTProto (Telegram's protocol), and Signal (the app) over Telegram (the app). Telegram is not E2EE by default, does not have E2EE for group chats, and does not have a good crpytographic protocol, and Musk has long been rallying against Signal.
Under Elon Musk, DOGE exfiltrated and breached American's data from the major government agencies they broke into, exfiltrated information to private databases (with DOGE employees leaving with flashdrives), Russian IPs accessing NLRB systems with provided credentials, and we're even seeing DOGE's once-alleged US citizen master-database project come to proposal as a DHS project under the SAVE act.
In just a year, Musk and DOGE helped to expand the US government's mass surveillance capacity beyond what we've ever seen. This is not surprising, since Elon Musk is aligned with the United States fascist movement, and mass surveillance is a hallmark of fascism.
We have a much stronger surveillance state, owing to DOGE and Musk.
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
No thanks.
There are probably things more relevant about X than what it is that Elon Musk currently proclaims about his political opinions?
Whats is worse, censorship or that only those with money are heard? Who do you think is doing the dividing and conquering? Not everything is political, sometimes it's just a rort.
Elon is pro-censorship for the things he doesn’t like, like the word “cis”.
You can be happy that Elon is allowing alt-right speech, that’s fair, he has brought that back to Twitter, slurs are finally allowed again, truly the speech we all long for, but anti-censorship as a principle? Please. Pull the other one.
Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.
They do this in almost every tweet.
Don't get me started on tiktok...
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?
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 then there's no explanation really.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
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?
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.
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.
Also, be careful around hookers.
I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
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.
That being said, there is no disguise.
"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.... Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the apps isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like... Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information."
Obvious political bias. If we can't talk across the aisle, we're doomed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
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.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/
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.
if you want to be an activist, take these weird positions
the guy on gab is also a human being with the same number of rights and deserving of the same empathy, freedoms, representation, etc. as the trendy oppressed group on instagram but is generally treated as dirty
obviously i am not suggesting that they post on low traffic platforms, but everything substantial and important happens on x, believing otherwise is delusional
just shows that these groups are not as egalitarian as they purport to be
>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.
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.
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
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.
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 think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
> 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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s
I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
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.
How is he anti-democratic?
What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right.
What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.
> Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over?
That’s like asking “would activists fight for your rights if no one was violating them”. I mean, no, but that doesn’t say anything. Had Twitter not have been sold but they eventually did the same things Elon did, then the EFF would probably have left just the same. Had Elon taken over but not done what he did, they probably wouldn’t have. The EFF is not on a personal vendetta, this is about the service as it is right now.
Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.
That is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
> EFF has changed
> EFF was fairly neutral ... Last year, they began ... I saw them becoming more and more partisan
I mean, I read that as a shift.
Oppression of minorities? Check
Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state? Check
Imprisoning dissenting voices? Check
Creating lists of people to get rid of? Check
Authoritarianism? Double check
Creating an out group and scapegoating it as an "enemy from within" Check
if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it doesn't have to scream it's a duck and sieg heil to be sure it's probably a duck or at least not a swan
There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.
ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.
If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_government_attacks...
>what the fuck does "Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state"
It means the states de-facto purpose is to funnel wealth into the hands of a few people (trump and elon included)
>What minorities are being oppressed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...
>what list of people exist to get rid of
ICE presumably has several
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/activists-sue-san-francis... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-activists-demonstrate... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-alert-eff-argues-ag... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/trumps-blocking-people-hi... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/comprehensive-legal-refor...
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.
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?
That's easy to sustain.
Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1993828797066748081
There are many accounts that show the flight paths but on a 24h delay. I see that as reasonable. It allows you to do view the data but there is no security risk.
Meanwhile people were banned off twitter for saying "men are not women".
Yes, a "free-speech absolutist" who explicitly promised to preserve a very specific example of free speech on explicit free speech grounds immediately banned the account when he was able to.
And then he banned reporters for reporting on it.
It's the easiest possible example to demonstrate his principles were never genuine here.
See also: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1993828797066748081
> Falsely labeling non-violent people as “fascist” or “Nazi” should be treated as incitement to murder
That's not very free speech, right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
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.
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.
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.
It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".
>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.
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.
It's usually couched in sophisticated-sounding faux-intellectual language, though, which is the key to posting whatever you want here. You can say literally anything on HN, so long as you camouflage it with SV techbro vernacular.
It must be some "ist" of you to assume it isn't transmisandry instead.
(And not sure that anything related to gender identity specifically divorced from sex is "sexism.")
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
Of course not.
And yet they leave X and only X.
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.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
What was wrong with just saying people instead of this nonsense? EFF has been a joke for a while now so has every organization that does something for people. It's just a box that can be ticked when someone asks something stupid like "who protects some imaginary rights".
How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
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.
Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.
Community Notes did happen without X. It was a feature introduced in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch.
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...
Twitter’s acquisition only started over a year later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
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.
Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
Why?
(It's also buying into the narrative that X is a ideological monolith. It, of course, is not. But it does lean a different way than other major social media platforms, which means there's a unique opportunity to speak to a different kind of audience!)
meeting people where they are doesn’t inherently mean you support where they are. You just meet the people themselves.
It’s not like X is really gaining anything from the EFF, so it feels a little bit performative. Sure.
For twitter and EFF, it's a work account, so probably 2FA with a timeout. You have to connect to it, pass the 2FA, then click, then copy paste. Or you can just log in to your tool, and post simultaneously on linkedin/mastodon (i don't know about the others, never used them). If your tool is well integrated, you can also just post on your company blog, and all social media wiht a public API are updated at the same time. TBH i don't really use social media, but i understand the "it's not big enough to loose 10 minutes each day, let's drop it if they don't fix their shitty API".
Then again, who cares one way or the other?
explain
"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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
If you just want to talk about how much you hate the current US administration with other people who also spend all their time talking about how much they hate the current US administration, there are much better places for that, such as r/politics.
Elon Musk takes effective control of government functions by bribing incoming President, uses power to close investigations into his driverless car technology that is currently running amok on city streets causing death and destruction: not technology related, off topic and uninteresting. Downvote and flag.
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...