>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.
The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
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."
when posts like this get flagged, but posts on the opposite side of the political spectrum don't, it really discourages people from posting. This seems like a valid critique of the content of the article that was posted whether you agree with it or not.
It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".
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.
I agree with you. It's clear that they're leaving X because "X bad", but they don't want to say it that way. I don't know if X is or isn't bad, but it seems pretty mainstream and a good representation of a lot of society, both US and international, so for an org that apparently cares for the online rights of people, it feels silly to leave a platform where there are - people. (and this is coming from someone who doesn't use X or social media in general)
It is a poor representation of society internationally. Twitter has never been a big platform outside the US (and Japan I believe). It's irrelevant most other places.
"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year."
13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.
> 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.
Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.
I hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that.
What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit.
E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
I have never seen KKK posts on X. Either you're commenting from personal experience, in which case, wow, who were you following, or you're going off reporting which would seem to be a bit skewed.
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'
> things that get on the [HN] front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
Interesting take. I'm not aware that anyone is doing vote rings or vote buying very successfully (considering that my own blog also makes it at an expected rate, and I know there isn't a group of friends voting that up) but I kinda assume that this is a thing for some of the bigger launches where they are hoping for conversions. Beyond a defined group coordinating their posts or votes, though, surely HN's front page can't be seen as vetted beyond "oh this looks trendy/hype"? People don't vote only after trying out the product or reading the full article. In many cases that would mean voting after it has already disappeared off of the front page for good
You can still stay pretty up to date (at least in AI) without even being on X, since everything distills out to every other platform anyway. Between /r/LocalLlama and the ThursdAI and Latent Space newsletters, I'm at most only a few days away from whatever the latest hype is.
I absolutely agree with your sentiment - but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing - and so by the time you are interesting in talking about the thing that happened last week - implications, use, whether it's legit or just hype - people have all moved onto the new thing.
HN is a nice consolidated view - and I pull up the home page 2-3 times a day (and have done so for 10+ years every day) - but, there is a firehose of information coming in on X - particularly if you have a very highly curated list - and some people are insanely high signal - Karpathy for instances always seems to zoom in on important things.
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.
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.
OSINT, retrogaming, fantasy art, simpsons memes, music tech news, celebrities, bizzare art projects.. I love my experience on X. I dont make any lists or anything.
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.
On this Instagram is far worse than X. Yeah, their suggested content rarely is the sort of thing that offends delicate sensibilities, but it is generally irrelevant slop and Meta always seems to be conspiring to trap you in it, giving you few options to remove it from your feed.
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.
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.
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:
Reddit is on the first page or at the top for well over half of my searches. Sometimes I find myself in complete physical-memory typing -site:reddit.com.
On the topic of leaving X but not TikTok and Facebook: I think being principled but pragmatic is necessary more so than ever. If you always pick absolutes, you'll quickly find yourself helping nobody. It requires a right balance, otherwise you end up justifying the means to an end. Certain principles cannot be comrpromised, others are a bit of a luxury. It's a moving target. It's a fuzzy target. You'll never quite get it right but you just keep trying. I think I'm most wary of those who think too rigidly and would see this as an intolerable contradiction.
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...
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".
Seems like any activist org should have two audiences:
1) Supporters who may become donors
2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters.
If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose.
Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire.
The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.
You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.
What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.
People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.
And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?
I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.
In this case, dealing with The Enemy is not only funding them, but lending your credibility.
Maybe it would be worth it if, as you say, they are finding ways to reach non-supporters, but Twitter has been X for almost four years. If the EFF finds that they're not recruiting people from among their opponents, then they can reasonably say that they've spent enough time trying.
Credibility with who? We’re so polarized that a single binary label will shift all credibility.
Experience, success, credentials none of it matters anymore. The left thinks everything on the right is stupid and evil, the right does the same, and everyone drinks their own kool aid.
If we all spent more time listening the guy who called someone a pedophile because he suggested the guy's plan to save people was ridiculous, would that improve discourse? I am skeptical.
It sounds like they don’t really get meaningful engagement/views on X anyway though. It sounds like it’s not a useful platform to reach any audience for them.
Not having an official account doesn’t mean that people are blocked from talking about EFF, only that it’ll happen by directing attention towards their website. URLs still work great for letting people talk, but there is a real question about whether you encourage people to look for you first on someone else’s property–effectively supporting their business by giving them your content and audience.
X, the non-consensual nudes app, surfaces the dumbest comments in any discussion by design. It is not a serious site, having a presence there is not meaningful.
It's like saying organizations should have a branded presence on 4chan otherwise they might not reach the very online and meme-poisoned demographics.
I do not see how being on a platform literally chasing away people with hate, sexism and outright CSAM is somehow making a wrong decision about audiences to attract...can you drop your political bias red colored shades and address this?
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.
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!"
EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
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?
"But You're Still on X?"
Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. 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.
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use X every day. This platform hosts mutual aid networks and serves as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the app isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
You own a small business that depends on X for customers.
Your abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information.
You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community.
Our presence on X is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how this platform suppresses marginalized voices, enables invasive behavioral advertising, and flags posts. 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.
We stay because the people on this platform 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They will accomplish nothing and be happy, like so many.
I used to respect the exodus, but these days my mental heuristics go off with red alert at the sight of a Bluesky icon replacing Twitter in a website footer.
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 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.
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
If that was really true, they wouldn't make a big post about why they are leaving, they would just turn off the lights and go elsewhere.
The problem for the EFF is that they don't have anywhere else to go with nearly the reach of Twitter. Bluesky has only 15 million monthly active users. They could pin their hopes on Facebook, but it's hard to think of a criticism of Twitter that wouldn't apply to Facebook.
Basically the problem for EFF and a lot of the progressive activist orgs out there is that they want a mass global audience but a platform with progressive activist moderation, and that was possible in the heyday of the Biden Administration, but starting with Musk's purchase of Twitter and firing of much of the progressive activist staff, together with the loss in the Missouri vs Biden consent decree, it's getting harder to find a truly mass audience social media platform that is willing to enforce progressive activist social norms.
As this realization sinks in, we are seeing organization after organization rage quit the mass market platforms and join more niche platforms that is moderated to their niche taste (e.g. mastodon, bluesky, etc), and this is just one example of that. The EFF of old would never have seen this as a problem, but for the present day EFF it's a big problem.
Another option is a medium without engagement at all. You post your stuff and that's it, for example you can quote/amplify but not comment. No zingers, mocking quote tweets, no clapbacks, etc. I think an organization like the EFF could tolerate that, they want a pure write-only medium where you make a PR announcement that gets lot of attention but is not subject to any disparagement.
Big orgs would love a system like that, but I'm not convinced it could draw a lot of eyeballs.
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.
Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook.
It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size.
Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate.
Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.
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.
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.
It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.
> 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.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.
If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.
For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.
The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.
However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.
> 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.
There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.
There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.
(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)
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".
Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention:
I wonder if the message of eff doesn’t resonate with the younger generation who did not see the OS wars first hand and instead always saw Microsoft as a cloud provider and Apple and Google as the OS providers.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
Reddit has been decreasing in quality for years, and especially since 2023. But it's compartmentalized by subreddit, and some subreddits have degraded more slowly than the rest of the site. You can still follow these subreddits through RSS, and old.reddit can still be navigated without JavaScript.
AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
I don’t follow any of the main subs, just niche interest ones that don’t have an alternative. I might try building up a community on Lemming, but there’s just very little activity there right now.
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.
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.
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.
closed my Twitter/X account when Elon bought it. I was an early adopter of Twitter and a heavy user prior to that (in consuming if not posting). But it turns out I don't miss it. Freed up time (to read HN, LOL).
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.”
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.
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.
Gross and performative, and I say this as someone who detests X and has never used it... when they were writing this crap they could have instead been writing about the ridiculous operating system user age validation laws.
Pretty asinine considering posting to Twitter costs… $0.
Also a surefire way to get people to take you less seriously when as an ostensible public benefactor and sometimes-whistleblower in a particular sector you make said asinine move for purely political virtue signalling purposes.
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.
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.
I have to say the reason EFF gives for completely avoiding any posts on X seems somewhat disingenuous. If they don't see their presence as endorsement, then - it isn't a dichotomy between "incessant tweeting all day every day" and "never tweet anything". In this post they said:
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions
Who said they need to tweet 5 times a day on average? For important announcements, tweet. Make it, I don't know, a tweet every few days. Even with somewhat reduced exposure, it's still wide exposure; and if you count heads rather than impressions, it's even more significant to be on different platforms.
I have a(n unfounded) suspicion that this may be about the cultural signaling of staying or not staying on twitter.
Disappointed with this blatantly partisan manoeuvre by a foundation like EFF.
I like what they do.
I think they’d be better off avoiding publicly declaring their anti-Musk credentials. I mean I know it’s like a rite of passage for all virtue signalling tribal leftwingers out there, but I always imagined EFF represented everyone. Not just the green haired nose-ringed “modern audience” who think they’re a majority (but actually aren’t)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes. In the 90's in particular. I'm old and I was in Idaho at the time. What I remember, and I try in vain to remind my conservative family and friends, is that both parties wanted that shit rode out of town on a rail back then. It is now the dominant world view in Idaho conservative politics. I will point to the "accomplishments" of our last legislative session as evidence.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. My grandparents were no paragon of 'racial justice' but did they ever hate those Nazis. Back then, the Nazis were excluded from 'polite society' and had no hope of gaining power through normal democratic channels. That has changed.
Sure, so did my dad, and Idaho politicians who are still in office to this day. Guess what? They don’t hate Nazis any more. Well, they don’t hate Republicans acting like Nazis. If a Democrat were to throw a Nazi salute they’d be upset about that.
I specifically remember my dad talking to his parents about that one on the phone and being scared for them.
Like my other comment below though, part of the reason they resorted to violence is because at that time, they had no hope of participating in mainstream, electoral politics.
Well. Treasure Valley felt remarkably more WS-ey to me this last time visiting home. The time before that was right before the election, so it feels like it's gotten even worse over time.
If you read Anti-Semite and Jew, one of Sartre’s main points about the rise of anti-semitism is the intentional adoption of a “nothing matters, lol” attitude of its adopters.
The entire point is to invite/allow otherwise “good” people to be able to think it’s not entirely serious, and that caring is pearl-clutching and is lame.
That way they can vote for their tax cuts, wear their “team” colors, and keep voting for “their” party.
It happens with successful sports teams all the time. Tiger Woods just got in his fourth (likely under the influence) car wreck, and sports media is already making excuses or talking about how hard he must have it. It’s the same process.
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. Part of me is also disturbed by the negative role technology is playing in all of this, yet we're all entranced by its appeal to do anything about it.
Political ideas don't come in isolation. You cited some relatively benign aspects of conservatism. But those are symptoms of a deeper process, and that same process brings both the benign aspects and the malignant aspects. People's stances on these issues aren't independent. They are correlated by some common factor that causes all of them, and we're not quite sure what that is and it may have evolutionary underpinnings. We call the common factor conservatism (or progressivism, when it's flipped the opposite way).
A lot of it is based in social position / class. People that benefit from the existing ways unsurprisingly want them to continue. People that do not benefit, would like to see it changed.
Conservatives are a minority because we live in an unequal society, so necessarily the people benefiting and wanting that to continue are that same minority. There are a relatively small number of people that are confused about their class position or are aspirational and confuse their current position with actually achieving a social leap.
Of course, then there are personality types that metabolize this in different ways, but the basis of politics is materialism. A lot of money and words are deployed to obscure this, which has been known for over a hundred years. I was reading Thucydides (440 BCE) and in the first few pages he grounds significant political events in materialist forces.
One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:
> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.
Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)
> I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al
I am sure you put these people in the same basket by no logical reason, as they are very different and the reason behind each of them is very different. As an Eastern European I understand a bit more Orban and Putin, I don't have to agree with them to understand how things work, and they the 3 have almost nothing in common but being targeted by the political left as the enemy.
Come on, you know what they mean. They're authoritarian populist leaders with a disregard for the rule of law. Cruel men that rejoice in the "destruction" of their political enemies both figuratively and literally. Men with little emotional control that suffer from severe anxiety at anything that doesn't fit their very narrow view of the world.
> 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.
You do not have to look beyond Elon’s own Twitter accounts posts, retweets, and likes, to see that he is a full fledged white supremacist. Calling him a Nazi is appropriate.
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.
> I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological"
It depends: if you support far right viewpoints, like wanting to deport minorities, the MSM will cover it as just politics. If you support far left (for America) viewpoints, like, wanting free healthcare, the MSM will cover it as if you're a radical communist.
To most people “I want to deport minorities” would imply nothing about citizenship status.
Someone with the opposite opinion would frame it as “open borders”, which is an extremist viewpoint globally and also not what people on the left in the US are advocating for.
Media coverage in the US is partisan. This is not an insightful viewpoint or nearly as incendiary as you’re making it out to be.
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 broader set of respective and respectable dilemmas.)
For example, just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by a revanchists regime declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders. It would be ridiculous (and depressingly realistic) for some critics to say: "They don't really want peace, or else they would be a nation of pacifists who would let themselves get annexed right now without bloodshed.)
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 candidate paradox 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.
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.
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
> 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.
Last year my sister visited me and she wanted to go a nearby karaoke bar because she loves karaoke. I'd never been to this place before.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
"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.
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.
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.
If I have trillions of monkeys on typewriters generating every possible combination of characters, and then from what they "produce" I carefully select what I want to show everyone who comes to my website, how responsible am I for what my visitors see?
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.
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
Why should I contribute to the wealth of a man who wants people like me dead? Why should I tolerate others who happily contribute to my own oppression?
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.
Yes, but also much of this was due to Stalin/USSR having alliance/agreement with Germany on attacking Poland. Many/most? US leftists were pacifists until Hitler attacked the USSR.
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?
Details are different, but there have been lots of examples over the years. Andrew Jackson had his "kitchen cabinet". There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal, Watergate. There are plenty of other examples. In large part if something is an example or not depends on your politics - people tend to overlook the mistakes of someone they support.
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.
Regarding your later edit:
> 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.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
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
I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?
People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.
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 vs making a Nazi salute on live television). 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. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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).
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/
>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).
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".
It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment, you are making it sound like he is going around doing it all the time. He's a bit of an eccentric, I genuinely believe he wasn't intending on it coming off like that.
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.
Well, consider that the alternative is a _corporation_ manipulating the algorithm per their own _corporate_ political needs. That's really not much of an improvement. Unless you also think that corporations should have more rights to political speech than individuals, which goes even further than the usual representation of Citizens United.
It is hard to someone has been giving EFF >=$1000 a year, every year, for the past 20 years, who also did not consider EFF to be engaging in political activism for 19 of those years.
C'mon. You know what they meant. They are clearly saying that the EFF used to to focus on pretty specific, arguably more bipartisan ideas and initiatives and now it has switched to a much more broad strategy that has strayed from its original mission. Surely, you should be able to understand this pretty basic point.
I do not agree that your statements are implied by GP, I do not agree with the suggestion that the reason for that is my incapacity to understand, and I do not agree with the new statements that you are introducing here either.
An interesting thing about this era is that things which were bipartisan in the 2000s are now seen as partisan. Some examples of things that I remember as bipartisan in the 2000s which are now seen as left-leaning ideas: NATO membership, suffrage for women, freedom from state religion, the Forestry Service, national parks.
> 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.
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
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."
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.
It is completely obvious that a lot of tech workers are basically evil. They get paid to work on evil things that hurt society and want to not feel like terrible people. See the thread on Musk and the cone head on self reflection.
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.
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
> but everything substantial and important happens on x,
This is not true, and you are stuck in a bubble if you believe this. X is not even in the top 10 most used social media platforms.
EFF needs to be on X (550M MAU) about as much as they need to be on Pinterest (570M MAU) or Quora (400M MAU).
Despite having fewer users than X, EFF gets more engagement on BlueSky and Mastodon, probably owing to EFF's mission being antithetical to the political project that is X.
EFF should prioritize the larger platforms, like Pinterest, Reddit (760M MAU), Snapchat (900M MAU), or the various larger Chinese social media platforms before they think about EFF. EFF doesn't even have a WeChat (1343M MAU).
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.
"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".
But isn't this capitulation? If you're not there raising your voice, who will? I know it sounds like a hopeless situation, but with consistent activism, I believe things can and will change.
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...
This looks like a last-ditch attempt by the EFF to thrust itself into the spotlight. EFF hasn’t been relevant for some time now.
It’s quite sad to see an organization go down this path; they became so strongly engaged in the culture war during the last 10 years that they lost sight of their core mission.
I even used to be a donor but ever since people like ev**de rose to prominence within the organization, it went downhill fast and I do not feel like they are doing something worthwhile with donor funds.
>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.
Does this not apply to X users?
The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
Nate Silver, famously popular (...lol) with the online left, made a post about this recently: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
EFF is, politically, left wing.
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."
when posts like this get flagged, but posts on the opposite side of the political spectrum don't, it really discourages people from posting. This seems like a valid critique of the content of the article that was posted whether you agree with it or not.
Well, I'm not discouraged at least. The entire article probably shouldn't even be on HN so whatever
It's funny that the (seemingly) right leaning people in this thread are criticizing the EFF for leaving Twitter while also simultaneously saying they will leave HN for the exact same reason, just "on the opposite side of the political spectrum".
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.
I agree with you. It's clear that they're leaving X because "X bad", but they don't want to say it that way. I don't know if X is or isn't bad, but it seems pretty mainstream and a good representation of a lot of society, both US and international, so for an org that apparently cares for the online rights of people, it feels silly to leave a platform where there are - people. (and this is coming from someone who doesn't use X or social media in general)
It is a poor representation of society internationally. Twitter has never been a big platform outside the US (and Japan I believe). It's irrelevant most other places.
"Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year."
13 million impressions? And how much did they pay to reach their audience? I'm absolutely gobsmacked that any organization is willing to walk away from 13 million impressions a year and very interested in know how many impressions/year they get on their top-ten outreach platforms if 13 million impressions/year (presumably for free ???) is something not worth the effort of dropping onto X.
> 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.
Given that social media posts are not free, in the sense that someone or something has to put some effort in to format the message for that particular site, I can see how a simple cost calculation would show that it is no longer worth it.
I hope they ran the numbers and did some cold surveying/analysis/postmortem before deciding that.
What is worse is those aren't shitty ad impressions. Interested people will be following maybe even expecting to see them. In addition and ironically also other interested people will be algorithmed in to their orbit.
E.g. I read more of a blogger I like because I follow him on LinkedIn over following RSS feed.
> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X
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.
>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.
But it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.
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.
(edited for clarity)
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?
cant they just copy an paste the same messages? like are they trying to manage critical 'seconds' and the eff?
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.
There's presumably engagement on those two.
It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
Retreating into smaller and smaller echo chambers where they get their way?
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.
Does it have to be either/or?
Volunteer your time to do a dual strategy with content that fits both. Comms takes time, the EFF is adapting its comm strategy.
Well, perhaps it's time to reconsider your perception of Bluesky and Mastodon.
> Something isn't adding up.
Yes, it’s your inability to do even the most basic verification of the data underlying your understanding before making claims.
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.
Nobody who's not terminally online ever used Twitter.
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.
Do regular people that aren't terminally online use X? I don't know any.
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
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.
Half this post is about how few people they're reaching 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 don't know any X user that I wouldn't describe as "terminally online" and the same goes for the Twitter days too.
The few people who were not terminally online left Twitter around the time it was renamed.
The most terminally online people left Twitter for BlueSky.
> Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.
You think those people are on X?
Not if you're shadowbanned
>Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it.
The entire point of microblogging platforms like twitter is for you to be terminally online.
What the heck else do you call the service that invented "You can SMS your updates from wherever, and it will be sent out to all your followers"?
Having to "Keep up" like that is what being terminally online is
Based on what they are seeing, nobody is seeing their posts on X either. That's the point. Did you miss it?
> 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.
What are you talking about? X is exclusively the domain of terminally-online people.
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...
there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff
13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?
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.
I have never seen KKK posts on X. Either you're commenting from personal experience, in which case, wow, who were you following, or you're going off reporting which would seem to be a bit skewed.
X "impressions" are not worth very much
At least half of those are bots.
Sounds like: I wont get out of bed for $100k
I had that exact same thought. The argument they presented applies to any walled garden, they gave no reason why X would be the exception.
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.
It's pretty damn simple actually. Their target audience by and large doesn't use twitter anymore, either.
They're a global issues advocacy organization. "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right.
Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.
> "Their target audience" is everyone, or at least it ought to be if they're doing their job right
Yes. If.
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.
This is a great point and it makes we worried that EFF might be pivoting to be less about the technological frontier and more about social issues.
Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.
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'
> Having an extensively curated list
This is key.
> things that get on the [HN] front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
Interesting take. I'm not aware that anyone is doing vote rings or vote buying very successfully (considering that my own blog also makes it at an expected rate, and I know there isn't a group of friends voting that up) but I kinda assume that this is a thing for some of the bigger launches where they are hoping for conversions. Beyond a defined group coordinating their posts or votes, though, surely HN's front page can't be seen as vetted beyond "oh this looks trendy/hype"? People don't vote only after trying out the product or reading the full article. In many cases that would mean voting after it has already disappeared off of the front page for good
My goodness, the only branch of work that I can think of where knowing something a few hours earlier is probably day trading also.
Seriously, if you're working on anything worthwhile, you can wait for the weekly digest. Everything else just seems like hyperiding.
You can still stay pretty up to date (at least in AI) without even being on X, since everything distills out to every other platform anyway. Between /r/LocalLlama and the ThursdAI and Latent Space newsletters, I'm at most only a few days away from whatever the latest hype is.
I absolutely agree with your sentiment - but it is often the case where you will get into the office at 9:00 AM - and everyone is talking about the biggest release/development that morning - and by lunch it's kind of old news and people have moved on to new thing - and so by the time you are interesting in talking about the thing that happened last week - implications, use, whether it's legit or just hype - people have all moved onto the new thing.
HN is a nice consolidated view - and I pull up the home page 2-3 times a day (and have done so for 10+ years every day) - but, there is a firehose of information coming in on X - particularly if you have a very highly curated list - and some people are insanely high signal - Karpathy for instances always seems to zoom in on important things.
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.
bsky is meant to hold the promise of control your algorithm, I don't see why that can't be the model going forward
The problem is largely one of community. The folks talking about AI are still primarily on X and haven't moved over.
The tech seems great, the people don't
He banned me after I replied to his tweet with my display name set as "Elon's Musk".
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
Almost as bad as saying vaccines are safe and effective.
Of all the things he did or said, this is pretty benign
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.
Astounds me that anyone was using the platform even before Musk took over it.
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.
OSINT, retrogaming, fantasy art, simpsons memes, music tech news, celebrities, bizzare art projects.. I love my experience on X. I dont make any lists or anything.
This is a poor take. "You can make this mismanaged steaming pile of bot-infested garbage better if you just filter everything!"
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.
On this Instagram is far worse than X. Yeah, their suggested content rarely is the sort of thing that offends delicate sensibilities, but it is generally irrelevant slop and Meta always seems to be conspiring to trap you in it, giving you few options to remove it from your feed.
Yep, thankfully there are mods to remove it all.
The problem is that there isn't really an alternative. The discussion is still happening there and nowhere else. (Trust me, I've looked.)
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.
I agree with your sentiment. But if we go this rigid with it, we might find that the majority of humanity does not have principles.
>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.
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.
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:
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?
I find it hard to believe that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have almost the exact same number of users. This seems to be skewed data.
Reddit is on the first page or at the top for well over half of my searches. Sometimes I find myself in complete physical-memory typing -site:reddit.com.
Why is this downvoted? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the topic of leaving X but not TikTok and Facebook: I think being principled but pragmatic is necessary more so than ever. If you always pick absolutes, you'll quickly find yourself helping nobody. It requires a right balance, otherwise you end up justifying the means to an end. Certain principles cannot be comrpromised, others are a bit of a luxury. It's a moving target. It's a fuzzy target. You'll never quite get it right but you just keep trying. I think I'm most wary of those who think too rigidly and would see this as an intolerable contradiction.
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...
That is just like when those US celebs moved to Europe after Trump was elected!
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".
Don't get me started on tiktok...
Interesting timing - just days after the announcement that Nicole Ozer will be taking over for Cindy Cohn as the Executive Director of EFF.
That's really useful context, thanks for sharing!
Seems like any activist org should have two audiences:
1) Supporters who may become donors
2) Neutrals/opponents who may become supporters.
If you only ever communicate in forums where people already agree with you, you’ll probably have optimized your fundraising, but will probably never achieve your actual purpose.
Activist orgs have to reach and turn the non-supporters somehow, and the absolute best way to achieve the opposite is to brand them as The Enemy and cut yourself off from them. Joining the omnicause is the icing on the cake, signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire.
The left are always looking for someone to expel, and the right are always looking for someone to recruit. Guess how this ends.
> signalling the end of focused goal-oriented activism in favor of the dilute, general grievance mire
An earlier signal was when the EFF ejected one of their founders from the board for disagreeing with their mission creep https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/25/john_gilmore_removed_... See http://www.toad.com/gnu/ and also the HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28992462
They ejected the man responsible for "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Sweet mother earth.
You might want to read their post before commenting. They seem very much aware of the need to reach people who aren't supporters and have always actively engaged with the platforms they are critical of. It's just that X isn't really an effective use of their time anymore.
I read the post.
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year.
Their YouTube channel reports 2,759,491 views in total, since 2006. So while X may be a fraction of what it was, it's still a significant multiple of at least one of the other channels they are happy to use.
What kind of activist org turns down the opportunity to reach 13 million people for essentially zero cost? One that has a different reason for doing so. The subtext is clear.
Agreed, I'm dismayed that the parent comment is currently the top comment, because it seems to be completely clueless as to what was actually in the blog post. EFF highlights that an X post gets less than 3% of the viewership of a tweet from 7 years ago. They also highlight that they are staying on platforms that they have strong disagreements with like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
I personally don't understand how anyone can use X anymore. I mean, even before the Musk takeover, there were plenty of loud (or, IMO, extremely obnoxious) voices from all sides, and I was generally not a fan because it just seemed designed to amplify the extremes and petty disagreements. Now, though, whenever I go there it is just a steaming pile of useless shit. Like I would look at a tweet or two from people whose perspectives I find insightful (even for folks I sometimes strongly disagree with), and the top comments under any of these people's posts is now the equivalent of "But your daddy is a giant poopie head!!" It doesn't even have any entertainment value, it's just pointless drivel where I can feel myself losing brain cells for every post I read.
Their posts on X are getting multiple millions of views. Yes, that has declined, but I need to see whether their viewership on Facebook has declined similarly before I can pass judgement on X.
People don’t use social media in the same way they did ten years ago.
And in any case, they’re still getting massive viewership on X by most people’s standards, surely?
I’m not convinced “X is declining” is a good faith argument here.
In this case, dealing with The Enemy is not only funding them, but lending your credibility.
Maybe it would be worth it if, as you say, they are finding ways to reach non-supporters, but Twitter has been X for almost four years. If the EFF finds that they're not recruiting people from among their opponents, then they can reasonably say that they've spent enough time trying.
Credibility with who? We’re so polarized that a single binary label will shift all credibility.
Experience, success, credentials none of it matters anymore. The left thinks everything on the right is stupid and evil, the right does the same, and everyone drinks their own kool aid.
We’ve all stopped listening.
If we all spent more time listening the guy who called someone a pedophile because he suggested the guy's plan to save people was ridiculous, would that improve discourse? I am skeptical.
It sounds like they don’t really get meaningful engagement/views on X anyway though. It sounds like it’s not a useful platform to reach any audience for them.
yeah, but twitter is 90% assholes these days
sadly, all social media is 90% a-holes these days
exactly why so many are turning it off, trying to get healthy, not just looking for another echo chamber to feed their egos
Not all of it. But I'm not about to advertise the exceptions to a general audience. :-P
Always has been
Not having an official account doesn’t mean that people are blocked from talking about EFF, only that it’ll happen by directing attention towards their website. URLs still work great for letting people talk, but there is a real question about whether you encourage people to look for you first on someone else’s property–effectively supporting their business by giving them your content and audience.
X, the non-consensual nudes app, surfaces the dumbest comments in any discussion by design. It is not a serious site, having a presence there is not meaningful.
It's like saying organizations should have a branded presence on 4chan otherwise they might not reach the very online and meme-poisoned demographics.
I do not see how being on a platform literally chasing away people with hate, sexism and outright CSAM is somehow making a wrong decision about audiences to attract...can you drop your political bias red colored shades and address this?
You could literally be describing any modern day social network with those slurs.
I follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.
So the nazi salute wasn’t enough to make them drop X, but the view count is?
"my heart goes out to you" followed by a nazi salute. are you for real?
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.
It's pretty obvious nobody here uses social media because EFFs pages on Facebook, Bluesky, and TikTok get like tens of impressions per post if that.
So they are chasing engagement, and X isn't giving them the attention they think they deserve.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
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!"
EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
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?
"But You're Still on X?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. 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.
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use X every day. This platform hosts mutual aid networks and serves as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the app isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
You own a small business that depends on X for customers. Your abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community. Our presence on X is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how this platform suppresses marginalized voices, enables invasive behavioral advertising, and flags posts. 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.
We stay because the people on this platform 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.
I don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?
Brand reputation. Every brand that chooses to use X implicitly supports X, even if they're not verified & paying X money.
Does anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.
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.
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.
Yes, people do in fact judge others for their associations.
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.
My neighbor blares Fox in their kitchen every day. I view them with the same flavor of suspicion as someone who posts there.
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.
some of the things you believe aren't true, no matter how strongly you believe them
I do, yeah. Hope that helps!
Yes.
I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
Not really, this is the kind of argument you only ever see on Reddit/HN, normal people don't care.
Who is "normal" in this context? Because people who support the EFF's mission are pretty clued into what is happening and do care.
All dozen bloosky users have been sure to chime in as well.
Going against the network effect out of principal doesn't seem to be a winning strategy when the goal is to raise awareness about issues.
That is idiotic.
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.
No, they even would get money for the engagement they get. This is purely moral grandstanding disguised as something else.
Not sure this is true anymore. X is now just pay to play. Organic engagement is completely dead there. It's all a virality game now.
Moral grandstanding is much better then vice grandstanding. Moral grandstandings are good, especially in a world that think being moral makes you a looser.
That being said, there is no disguise.
They will accomplish nothing and be happy, like so many.
I used to respect the exodus, but these days my mental heuristics go off with red alert at the sight of a Bluesky icon replacing Twitter in a website footer.
Something like leaving X and staying on Linkedin (and the other platforms) is kinda funny
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 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.
>between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform.
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 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
If that was really true, they wouldn't make a big post about why they are leaving, they would just turn off the lights and go elsewhere.
The problem for the EFF is that they don't have anywhere else to go with nearly the reach of Twitter. Bluesky has only 15 million monthly active users. They could pin their hopes on Facebook, but it's hard to think of a criticism of Twitter that wouldn't apply to Facebook.
Basically the problem for EFF and a lot of the progressive activist orgs out there is that they want a mass global audience but a platform with progressive activist moderation, and that was possible in the heyday of the Biden Administration, but starting with Musk's purchase of Twitter and firing of much of the progressive activist staff, together with the loss in the Missouri vs Biden consent decree, it's getting harder to find a truly mass audience social media platform that is willing to enforce progressive activist social norms.
As this realization sinks in, we are seeing organization after organization rage quit the mass market platforms and join more niche platforms that is moderated to their niche taste (e.g. mastodon, bluesky, etc), and this is just one example of that. The EFF of old would never have seen this as a problem, but for the present day EFF it's a big problem.
Another option is a medium without engagement at all. You post your stuff and that's it, for example you can quote/amplify but not comment. No zingers, mocking quote tweets, no clapbacks, etc. I think an organization like the EFF could tolerate that, they want a pure write-only medium where you make a PR announcement that gets lot of attention but is not subject to any disparagement.
Big orgs would love a system like that, but I'm not convinced it could draw a lot of eyeballs.
However if you view your content as valuable and the algorithm does not anymore, it's probably not the best platform for you to be on.
> Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
... paraphrase: meet people where they are at ....
Sounds even more contradictory now!
And the traffic loss doesn't explain it. That is a sunk cost fallacy.
Understandable on ideology standpoint. But my take is that numbers are indicating that people stop caring about EFF.
The world that hackers grew up in just doesn't exist anymore.
The EFF is leaving a platform voluntarily? Because they disagree with the politics of the platform? What?
I don't know man that seems pretty lame. Stick around and argue with people if you think twitter is so bad now.
I still can't get used to Twitter being called X. What horrible branding.
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.
Some context.
Worth keeping in mind that Twitter/X is something like the 8th largest US-based social media site. Like it's ~1/6 the size of Facebook.
It's in all probability smaller than Pinterest (we cannot get trustworthy numbers from Twitter/X). LinkedIn is 2x its size, and real people across a swath of society use it. Knocking Threads for the Instagram distribution is silly because part of the point of posting is to get distribution. This is a PLUS for Threads, which organically is still close to Twitter/X's size.
Nobody is saying it's urgent for brands to be on Quora, a close size mate.
Of these sites, Twitter/X is the only one that (effectively) requires brands to pay to post.
BlueSky and Mastodon are much smaller than Twitter/X, and they're staying on the platforms, so this is a moot point.
Smaller platforms with more engagement? Entirely possible they reach more people on those platforms.
In any case, my point was more about the silly idea that it's imperative for any organization to be on the 8th-largest US site.
Well, at least they realize they're hypocrites.
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.
I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019.
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.
It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.
> 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.
I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?
I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.
If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.
For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.
The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.
However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.
> 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.
I'd say both of those.
There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.
There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015
> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.
(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)
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".
Honestly, tbh it just looks like a skill issue when looking through their feed:
https://x.com/EFF
Making content platform "native" and garner attention is hard work and while their first party content might be great, it isn't great "X" content which is part of the problem. There are many examples of legacy organizations optimizing for the platform and garner a lot of attention:
https://x.com/JohnCarreyrou/status/2041737922458599477?s=20
Also, people want to hear from individuals or a distinct voice, not an organization:
https://x.com/FFmpeg
Any chance they keep an RSS?
Yes: https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml
I wonder if the message of eff doesn’t resonate with the younger generation who did not see the OS wars first hand and instead always saw Microsoft as a cloud provider and Apple and Google as the OS providers.
Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU
What is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?
It’s just a word. People is fine too. Folks just sounds better.
If that were true then they would have written:
"Young folks, folks of color, queer folks". This is not the case.
As one of them queer folks, it just rolls of the tongue easier.
It’s just another word for a group, same as people.
Woke folks use this word to signal their allegiance to the in-group.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-folks/
My first thought was that 5-10 posts a day is just too much. Can't expect everyone to read everything and also react to each one.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
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.
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.
[0]: https://substack.com/home/post/p-193285131
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.
The "de minimis" at the end is a pretty sick burn.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120
It is, but the other one is a link to their twitter post, whereas this is the longer self-hosted statement. This is a better, more informative source.
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 :)
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s
you could just post less or use it for major updates.
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.
>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" >Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
But then there's no explanation really.
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.
"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
EFF knows its audience. No doubt that's why "X" isn't working so well for them.
Most tech professionals do not fit these categories, however much powers that be have tried to change that.
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 don't use social media at all, unless you count HN as such.
I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
Godwin
Ahh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p
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.
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.
I imagine that a good chunk of the HN user base looks and acts like those two dweebs that were deposed for their involvement in DOGE.
Nothing but arrogance and avarice.
Posts about US politics that have nothing to do with technology and are otherwise uninteresting get flagged because HN is not the place for that.
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.
DOGE posts had everything to do with technology and silicon valley
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.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism
Even the posts which had to do with technology were flagged so it definitely felt more like Elon bots or Elon fanboys than something organic.
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 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?
Coming soon, on a long enough timeline:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
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.
You're keeping Reddit of all places? If you want a net win for attention and value, Reddit ain't it.
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.
Reddit has been decreasing in quality for years, and especially since 2023. But it's compartmentalized by subreddit, and some subreddits have degraded more slowly than the rest of the site. You can still follow these subreddits through RSS, and old.reddit can still be navigated without JavaScript.
AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
I don’t follow any of the main subs, just niche interest ones that don’t have an alternative. I might try building up a community on Lemming, but there’s just very little activity there right now.
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.
Oh thanks, I didn't know you could do that. I do like the front page recommendations sometimes but maybe I'll try this
How the hell is this comment shadowed? It's 100% true.
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.
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.
closed my Twitter/X account when Elon bought it. I was an early adopter of Twitter and a heavy user prior to that (in consuming if not posting). But it turns out I don't miss it. Freed up time (to read HN, LOL).
Elon is a grumpy old bastard now. That’s all he is, really.
"The math hasn’t worked out for a while now."
How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
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.”
They're an advocacy organization. They should want people who don't want to hear what they have to say to hear what they have to say.
Brand reputation from staying on Twitter is part of the math.
How could you possibly lose reputation from that?
They lose credibility within their extremely narrow in-group.
Tweeting is easy. Managing the weirdos that respond to your tweets is hard.
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.
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.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
Gross and performative, and I say this as someone who detests X and has never used it... when they were writing this crap they could have instead been writing about the ridiculous operating system user age validation laws.
EFF Launches Age Verification Hub as Resource Against Misguided Laws (December 10, 2025)
~ https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-launches-age-verifica...
Pretty asinine considering posting to Twitter costs… $0.
Also a surefire way to get people to take you less seriously when as an ostensible public benefactor and sometimes-whistleblower in a particular sector you make said asinine move for purely political virtue signalling purposes.
‘Stay in your lane’ comes to mind.
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.
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.
Leave today
I have to say the reason EFF gives for completely avoiding any posts on X seems somewhat disingenuous. If they don't see their presence as endorsement, then - it isn't a dichotomy between "incessant tweeting all day every day" and "never tweet anything". In this post they said:
> Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions
Who said they need to tweet 5 times a day on average? For important announcements, tweet. Make it, I don't know, a tweet every few days. Even with somewhat reduced exposure, it's still wide exposure; and if you count heads rather than impressions, it's even more significant to be on different platforms.
I have a(n unfounded) suspicion that this may be about the cultural signaling of staying or not staying on twitter.
Disappointed with this blatantly partisan manoeuvre by a foundation like EFF.
I like what they do.
I think they’d be better off avoiding publicly declaring their anti-Musk credentials. I mean I know it’s like a rite of passage for all virtue signalling tribal leftwingers out there, but I always imagined EFF represented everyone. Not just the green haired nose-ringed “modern audience” who think they’re a majority (but actually aren’t)
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.
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).
That too would very likely be seen as deeply political.
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.
10 years ago Wayland was in much worse state. It started being good in the last few years, though some features are still lacking.
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.
Whenever I see X used, I wonder if the author will return to replace the variable with the actual name.
I was thinking of X11 as well, but did not feel old - until I read your text. ;)
My favourite microblogging platform is way.land
You're aging well
Probably more reasonable.
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
It would be ironic if Xorg launched a twitter competitor using a custom update protocol (an X extension) over the network and TCL
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
My first thought was "so they go commandline now?". Because X for me is still "the graphical interface".
X11? What is that, one of Musk's children?
I remember being dazzled by Xeyes.
I had the exact same experience.
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.
At long last. It should be the case with everybody.
Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
> 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.
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.
North Idaho specifically has been a hub for white power movements for a while: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/mar/27/north-idaho-an...
Yes. In the 90's in particular. I'm old and I was in Idaho at the time. What I remember, and I try in vain to remind my conservative family and friends, is that both parties wanted that shit rode out of town on a rail back then. It is now the dominant world view in Idaho conservative politics. I will point to the "accomplishments" of our last legislative session as evidence.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. My grandparents were no paragon of 'racial justice' but did they ever hate those Nazis. Back then, the Nazis were excluded from 'polite society' and had no hope of gaining power through normal democratic channels. That has changed.
Sure, so did my dad, and Idaho politicians who are still in office to this day. Guess what? They don’t hate Nazis any more. Well, they don’t hate Republicans acting like Nazis. If a Democrat were to throw a Nazi salute they’d be upset about that.
> That has changed.
That was changed.
That timeline leaves out the bombs around Coeur d'Alene.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/10/01/Coeur-dAlene-bombing...
I specifically remember my dad talking to his parents about that one on the phone and being scared for them.
Like my other comment below though, part of the reason they resorted to violence is because at that time, they had no hope of participating in mainstream, electoral politics.
Well. Treasure Valley felt remarkably more WS-ey to me this last time visiting home. The time before that was right before the election, so it feels like it's gotten even worse over time.
If you read Anti-Semite and Jew, one of Sartre’s main points about the rise of anti-semitism is the intentional adoption of a “nothing matters, lol” attitude of its adopters.
The entire point is to invite/allow otherwise “good” people to be able to think it’s not entirely serious, and that caring is pearl-clutching and is lame.
That way they can vote for their tax cuts, wear their “team” colors, and keep voting for “their” party.
It happens with successful sports teams all the time. Tiger Woods just got in his fourth (likely under the influence) car wreck, and sports media is already making excuses or talking about how hard he must have it. It’s the same process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew
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. Part of me is also disturbed by the negative role technology is playing in all of this, yet we're all entranced by its appeal to do anything about it.
I could put my signature on your comment as if it was mine, wouldn't change even a comma.
Political ideas don't come in isolation. You cited some relatively benign aspects of conservatism. But those are symptoms of a deeper process, and that same process brings both the benign aspects and the malignant aspects. People's stances on these issues aren't independent. They are correlated by some common factor that causes all of them, and we're not quite sure what that is and it may have evolutionary underpinnings. We call the common factor conservatism (or progressivism, when it's flipped the opposite way).
A lot of it is based in social position / class. People that benefit from the existing ways unsurprisingly want them to continue. People that do not benefit, would like to see it changed.
Conservatives are a minority because we live in an unequal society, so necessarily the people benefiting and wanting that to continue are that same minority. There are a relatively small number of people that are confused about their class position or are aspirational and confuse their current position with actually achieving a social leap.
Of course, then there are personality types that metabolize this in different ways, but the basis of politics is materialism. A lot of money and words are deployed to obscure this, which has been known for over a hundred years. I was reading Thucydides (440 BCE) and in the first few pages he grounds significant political events in materialist forces.
One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:
> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.
Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)
> I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al
I am sure you put these people in the same basket by no logical reason, as they are very different and the reason behind each of them is very different. As an Eastern European I understand a bit more Orban and Putin, I don't have to agree with them to understand how things work, and they the 3 have almost nothing in common but being targeted by the political left as the enemy.
> the 3 have almost nothing in common
Come on, you know what they mean. They're authoritarian populist leaders with a disregard for the rule of law. Cruel men that rejoice in the "destruction" of their political enemies both figuratively and literally. Men with little emotional control that suffer from severe anxiety at anything that doesn't fit their very narrow view of the world.
Politics is all-encompassing. You don’t get to declare your beliefs privileged and above contestation. We always have to fight these battles.
> 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.
That is a good example of "dumb shit". No one believes Musk is a Nazi, but they try to make hay with it anyway.
You do not have to look beyond Elon’s own Twitter accounts posts, retweets, and likes, to see that he is a full fledged white supremacist. Calling him a Nazi is appropriate.
Ok, I went and looked at his last 50 or so tweets. I didn't see anything that supports what you are saying.
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.
Protected speech can be beyond politics. Politics doesn't subsume all protected speech.
> I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological"
It depends: if you support far right viewpoints, like wanting to deport minorities, the MSM will cover it as just politics. If you support far left (for America) viewpoints, like, wanting free healthcare, the MSM will cover it as if you're a radical communist.
This is entirely framing.
To most people “I want to deport minorities” would imply nothing about citizenship status.
Someone with the opposite opinion would frame it as “open borders”, which is an extremist viewpoint globally and also not what people on the left in the US are advocating for.
Media coverage in the US is partisan. This is not an insightful viewpoint or nearly as incendiary as you’re making it out to be.
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 broader set of respective and respectable dilemmas.)
For example, just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by a revanchists regime declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders. It would be ridiculous (and depressingly realistic) for some critics to say: "They don't really want peace, or else they would be a nation of pacifists who would let themselves get annexed right now without bloodshed.)
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 candidate paradox 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambo%27s
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
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.
It's not the plot/story that are racist. It was the slurs and illustrations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
For a long time I thought that was a fever dream from my childhood. Nope. I still can't quite believe that was real, but I personally remember it.
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
> 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.
Last year my sister visited me and she wanted to go a nearby karaoke bar because she loves karaoke. I'd never been to this place before.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
People have absolute freedom of expression.
"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.
It is absolutely your right to express your self by not going to these places.
That is the beauty of freedom. You make the choice.
> People have absolute freedom of expression.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
Yes, exactly.
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.
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.
I expect people to be different.
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.
X/twitter is a media company. choosing which media products to purchase based on political values is how it has always worked.
Choosing media producers based on their politics is how it always worked. Social networks are not producers of their content.
I've got a book for you to read...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
If I have trillions of monkeys on typewriters generating every possible combination of characters, and then from what they "produce" I carefully select what I want to show everyone who comes to my website, how responsible am I for what my visitors see?
they pay people to create content for their platform, and use their editorial control to determine what gets surfaced for you to see.
how is that not "producing content"?
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.
And yet people struggle to get Elon Musk out of their feeds on Twitter.
And yet we pretend he's the only person x pays to post content.
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
Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?
A long and storied history, the abolitionists used it pretty extensively well before it was named: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Boycott
They know nothing changed. They want to pretend otherwise.
Why should I contribute to the wealth of a man who wants people like me dead? Why should I tolerate others who happily contribute to my own oppression?
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.
Yes, but also much of this was due to Stalin/USSR having alliance/agreement with Germany on attacking Poland. Many/most? US leftists were pacifists until Hitler attacked the USSR.
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?
Details are different, but there have been lots of examples over the years. Andrew Jackson had his "kitchen cabinet". There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal, Watergate. There are plenty of other examples. In large part if something is an example or not depends on your politics - people tend to overlook the mistakes of someone they support.
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.
Regarding your later edit:
> 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.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
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
Im not sure where your sense of history is coming from. One of the US‘s founding events was a boycott of British goods for political reasons.
I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?
People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.
Aptly, given Elon's ancestry, did the whole anti-apartheid movement simply pass you by?
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 vs making a Nazi salute on live television). 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. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.
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).
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.
Buying a newspaper has always been a political act
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.
It is the way they express those views.
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...
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boycotts
When the business owner is in control over the algorithm that determines what you see on the product he owns.
It's not like they are separate at all, the owner is very active on the site as both a user and a god-moderator.
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.
No one would say they used "David Duke's Whites Only Car Wash" but "didn't support the owner's politics."
It's always amazing how much that kind of person will pretend not to get it, and whine about being a pariah.
Musk’s account is the most engaged and followed account on Twitter. So Twitter is de facto his global soapbox.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
> To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement
That ... does not hold at all. You wouldn't buy or subscribe to an openly Nazi paper unless you are a full blown white supremacist.
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).
There's "outspoken" and "political messaging" ... and then there's supporting Nazi-adjacent characters.
Elon Musk will always be just a Giant, Nazi-aligned, Dildo on my scorecard.
Obviously that doesn't matter to anyone. But it matters to me.
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/
>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.
Enjoy.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
The conflict seems as old as ever. Labor vs union-busting robber baron.
This question is a deflection and I suspect is intentionally disingenuous since it literally ignores the main point of the parent's comment.
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).
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".
>throwing those salutes
It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment, you are making it sound like he is going around doing it all the time. He's a bit of an eccentric, I genuinely believe he wasn't intending on it coming off like that.
> "white homeland"
Where is this quote available?
> It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment
He was quite self aware of what he did. He immediately followed it up by visiting a rally for the far right in Germany.
He did it twice and knew exactly what he was doing. The crowd he was in front of ate it right up.
TL;DR
Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
lol what? Still hundreds of millions of users on X.
Apparently not ones interested in what EFF is writing.
"what do you mean there's no more sheep in my field? There's hundreds of wolves!"
wtf bro
bye!
no one cares
Weird thing to say about an article with over 600 comments.
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.
Well, consider that the alternative is a _corporation_ manipulating the algorithm per their own _corporate_ political needs. That's really not much of an improvement. Unless you also think that corporations should have more rights to political speech than individuals, which goes even further than the usual representation of Citizens United.
It is hard to someone has been giving EFF >=$1000 a year, every year, for the past 20 years, who also did not consider EFF to be engaging in political activism for 19 of those years.
C'mon. You know what they meant. They are clearly saying that the EFF used to to focus on pretty specific, arguably more bipartisan ideas and initiatives and now it has switched to a much more broad strategy that has strayed from its original mission. Surely, you should be able to understand this pretty basic point.
I do not agree that your statements are implied by GP, I do not agree with the suggestion that the reason for that is my incapacity to understand, and I do not agree with the new statements that you are introducing here either.
> bipartisan ideas
An interesting thing about this era is that things which were bipartisan in the 2000s are now seen as partisan. Some examples of things that I remember as bipartisan in the 2000s which are now seen as left-leaning ideas: NATO membership, suffrage for women, freedom from state religion, the Forestry Service, national parks.
Things are changing.
> 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.
>What exactly are “neutral rights”?
Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.
> Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them
That is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.
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
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 is complaining about a shift from one set of positions to a different set.
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."
the EFF didn't move from political neutral. The right just moved more right.
> not complaining about shifting positions
> 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.
Read it as you wish. I would have been just as displeased if they had swung "right" instead of "left."
I can't believe such a nonpolitical organization would do this!!! Come on, you either have to be lying or you were never paying attention.
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...
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.
People who fight for individual rights kinda have a problem with Nazis. Big freaking surprise.
So many Fascists now on Hacker News. I'd ask how this came to be, but I'm pretty sure I have a good idea.
It is completely obvious that a lot of tech workers are basically evil. They get paid to work on evil things that hurt society and want to not feel like terrible people. See the thread on Musk and the cone head on self reflection.
I'm sure we humans can do better than "everyone who disagrees with me politically is evil"
Perhaps, but it’s a good starting point, especially nowadays.
>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?"
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
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.
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
> but everything substantial and important happens on x,
This is not true, and you are stuck in a bubble if you believe this. X is not even in the top 10 most used social media platforms.
EFF needs to be on X (550M MAU) about as much as they need to be on Pinterest (570M MAU) or Quora (400M MAU).
Despite having fewer users than X, EFF gets more engagement on BlueSky and Mastodon, probably owing to EFF's mission being antithetical to the political project that is X.
EFF should prioritize the larger platforms, like Pinterest, Reddit (760M MAU), Snapchat (900M MAU), or the various larger Chinese social media platforms before they think about EFF. EFF doesn't even have a WeChat (1343M MAU).
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.
And downvoted to pieces. HN is such a cool place for dialogue!
"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".
What's eff?
But isn't this capitulation? If you're not there raising your voice, who will? I know it sounds like a hopeless situation, but with consistent activism, I believe things can and will change.
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...
We're staying on IG because that's where the queers hang out. What.
I used to be a regular donor to EFF but stopped when it became clear they had lost sight of their mission.
This looks like a last-ditch attempt by the EFF to thrust itself into the spotlight. EFF hasn’t been relevant for some time now.
It’s quite sad to see an organization go down this path; they became so strongly engaged in the culture war during the last 10 years that they lost sight of their core mission.
I even used to be a donor but ever since people like ev**de rose to prominence within the organization, it went downhill fast and I do not feel like they are doing something worthwhile with donor funds.