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.
Hey, do you remember that time Hitler said "My heart goes out to you" and did the Nazi salute?
Yeah, no one does. Sad to see this as the top comment here.
The EFF is just complaining because they have made themselves irrelevant. They are "free speech advocates" that advocate for censorship. They take the side of their largest donors and could care less about free speech.
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.
PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
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).
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.
It was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.
So I feared for Sambo when he encountered the tigers. I was elated when he eluded them by first racing around the tree and then climbing it. I was mystified how tigers running round and round a tree could turn to butter (but set that aside so I could continue the story and reduce my fearful suspense). I was relieved to see that Sambo was safe. I identified with Sambo (although I am neither black or brown).
Hoorah for the fantastic tales from many lands that filled my childhood and those of my brothers and sisters with wonder!
I am still a child when I read fairy tales and fables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Samb...
"If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Yes? If you go to the southern part of the United States, there are many restaurants with Confederate memorabilia and Confederate flags on the back of truck windows.
Some trucks even have hairy testicles hanging off the hitch haha!
I find the idea of venerating an ideology that held that it was ok to hold human beings in bondage from the moment of their birth to their death to be abhorrent.
And that icludes not using x. And it includes criticising, mocking or talking about what x owner does.
Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.
Are you that user that replaces all your comments with periods once enough people flag you?
And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.
Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.
This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions.
It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.
I don’t expect them to provide a platform for people who make it a point to hate others and advocate for removal of their / my rights and so on.
how is that not "producing content"?
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.
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.
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.
I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist and making a Nazi salute on live television are very different things). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.
As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), most of them preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum.
Also, there were always some people of influence that held extreme views. But such people behaving in an uncivilised manner in public was less common (and certainly less accepted).
Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1].
That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman.
>Seems to me that this is what has changed.
It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts.
The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category.
Enjoy.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z3rj7ty/revision/7
I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]
Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.
[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...
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.
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).
Elon Musk will always be just a Giant Dildo on my scorecard.
Obviously that doesn't matter to anyone. But it matters to me.
And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.
(And most of the other top-engaged accounts are MAGA accounts: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...)
My issue with comments like this is that they substitute moral sorting for understanding. Their main effect is to provoke disgust, identify the villain, and let readers affirm that they are on the right side. That emotional reaction is sincere.
It also shrinks the debate space for real understanding and real debate, because once a thread is framed that way, disagreement starts to look like sympathy and nuance starts to look like evasion. The tribalism kicks in and polarization continues.
The more useful discussion is what exactly is being signaled here, why it is being signaled now, who it is meant to reach, what norms it is testing, and what response that calls for.
Which incidentally means that there is by definition no debating tenants of a position that can't survive one minute of good faith review. They're not there to debate. They're there to drown out and silence a truth about material reality that they're upset about.
If you refuse to engage in democratic systems you lose by default.
I'm still not sure why Harris didn't fight to appear on JRE.
Hilary Clinton made the same mistake. And the same mistakes are being made in Europe.
If we turn our back on the voting population you have to accept that someone else who reaches out to them gets their vote.
Compare to the competitor Bluesky. It’s filled with hate posts, calls for violence, etc. the biggest one is communism symbols - they are very banned in a lot of European countries. Being from former soviet republic - it’s far more offensive than non-existent nazi boogeyman media has manufactured.
To say there's no growing movement towards Nazi and anti-Jewish ideologies is to be willfully ignorant of the world around you.
There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.
A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.
It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.
Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.
It was always a colonial white nationalist state and it took a civil war + second founding before people weren't treated as property. It then took nearly another 100 years before all peoples in this country could vote.
We're literally the first generation of Americans who grew up with nearly total emancipation + universal suffrage and we still have people fighting to bring back polling taxes and removing citizenship.
American values?
Manifest destiny? Trail of tears? Japanese internment camps? Madison Square Garden Nazi rallies in the 1930s?
I'd argue that at least 30% of Americans throughout history have been white supremacists. Heck, the country was founded by rebelling against the British, that amongst other measures (many to do with taxes) wanted to limit Western expansion against non White peoples.
Shouldn't like, half of Oklahoma - LEGALLY - belong to Native Americans? Based on treaties the US has signed.
Only Titanic and Avatar earned more money (inflation adjusted) than this film:
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.
> 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 in bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)
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.
Of course, as expected, the Elon Musk Defense League showed up right on time. Does he give out $100 for every post defending his honor online?
"It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured."
it's an absolute joke anyone disputes what he did
https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-cory-booker-made-sim...
But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find.
That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.
Those are different gestures. Musk is clearly forcefully throwing out his harm, mimicking the Nazi salute. Booker is moving his arm from his chest to a waving motion, using two hands instead of one at some points.
It seemed pretty blatant to me if you watch the whole video, the chest pound and the clear arm/hand extension really makes it difficult to see as anything else.
It was distinctly different from the stills of other politicians waving that often get used as comparison by trolls trying to defend it... when you compare videos the difference is not even questionable.
But you knew that.
https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/01/02/hypocrisy-on-full-di...
They are not "exactly" the same. There's a symbolic reason you keep your hand flat, rigid, and parallel to the arm, in a salute.
Also, when have they joked about it being a Nazi salute after the fact like Elon Musk did? https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882406209187409976
If they did, they'd make international news for the same reason.
They did not. A freeze frame of someone waving their hand ain't remotely close to the specific "from my heart to the stars" gesture that Elon Musk did twice in a row.
Which doesn't even matter as much as his long, established history of pushing white-supremacist views, supporting white supremacist movements, and using neo-nazi dog whistles (like posting 14 flag emojis at 14:14PM EST).
> business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland"
It is not every commenter's duty to cite their sources when you have the ability to easily infer the context and search the internet. These are very well documented actions that they refer to. Your attempts to drive sentiment through casting doubt are noticed.
Oh come on. Everyone who's been paying attention enough to warrant having opinions on the subject knows what the reference is to.
But if you just came out of a cryogenic freeze, they're talking about:
1. Elon Musk appearing to be giving a Nazi salute at Trump's inauguration [1]
2. Elon Musk espousing and propagating white supremacist views nearly on a daily basis[2]
3. Elon Musk openly supporting borderline Neo-Nazi[3][4] German AfD party[5]
4. Elon Musk promulgating the myth of "white genocide"[6]
I guess if you somehow missed all of that over the past few years, you wouldn't know what the parent comment is about.
But in that case, you shouldn't be taking a part in this conversation, or opining about what would "infuse[sic] more polarisation".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VfYjPzj1Xw
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
[3] https://www.tpr.org/podcast/the-source/2024-07-31/frontline-...
[4] https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangerous-liais...
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/25/europe/elon-musk-germany-afd-...
[6] https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0lhfn68
[3]
[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1962406618886492245 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2030202550259962338
That's just disgusting stuff. Gutter white nationalism.
But at least I see where you're making the connection to the phrase "white homeland" even though neither of the people involved are calling for that. Thanks for the link.
South Africa's transition away from being a nuclear apartheid state was an objective win for everyone, everywhere.
No, it isn't. It's a distinction without a difference.
Why do you think that makes a difference?
Hint: white supremacy (believing whites are superior).
You don't speak for me, and I find you embarrassing.
What exactly means to be culturally white in US?
Everyone should hate fascism and Nazis.
For most of the past five centuries, the people you're lumping into this thing called 'white' would've considered it fighting words to do so.
The things that are under threat are the contemporary cultural values of openness and acceptance of other cultures/relgions/traits. These are truly valuable, positive aspects that stand out in contemporary American and European societies, and these are the things that are legitimately under threat, ironically, by those who attempt to normalize racism and xenophobia.
Slavers deliberately mixed different groups of kidnapped Africans so they had no shared language and sold their children so they couldn't pass anything on to the next generation.
We are not the same.
Even just the disingenuous boosting of obvious lies that are convenient to his worldview (claiming genuine curiosity), by a supposedly intelligent man, is gross enough.
A quick Google produces a pretty good summary: https://share.google/aimode/rL9lSxwPyJaxdFsap
There's also his history of obsessing about race, especially "preserving" the white race: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
Elon has frequently lied about George Soros paying activists, and espoused the "white replacement theory", which is that Jews are conspiring to "dilute" and replace the white population.
He has also platformed literal white supremacists on X -- at the same time he has silenced his own critics. If Elon isn't a literal Nazi, he supports ideologies that are 100% compatible with Nazism.
Also in that Guardian article the evidence given for him being an anti-semite are that he unbanned people on Twitter and that he supports the AfD and told the country to get over its "past guilt" (a two-word quote btw is a sign of journalistic malfeasance, if you can't fit the context of a quote in your article then don't include the quote at all).
So, that's really extremely underwhelming evidence and honestly I'd appreciate a more critical reading of the source material you've provided.
I think you and MANY others should probably have a significantly higher bar for calling someone a white supremacist or a Nazi given all that such a statement implies.
Elon's behavior is truly disgraceful, but spouting dumb shit is not "beyond politics".
There are many political opinions that I strongly believe in that I am comfortable disagreeing with people on. I believe everyone has a right to health care, and that society should guarantee basic necessities for everyone. I even feel that belief is a morality based belief. However, I can accept people disagreeing with me, and can accept that there are some strong arguments against my belief, and that good people can disagree with my position.
On the other hand, if someone believes that certain races should not have the same rights, or that women should be given less agency than men, I will not entertain that argument or accept that it is just a political dispute. That is a fundamental moral issue, and is beyond JUST politics.
Just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by revanchists declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders.
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.
Honestly with "AI" helping a lot of the boring configuration tedium, I feel like I might finally reach the stage where I like my desktop environment config.
Of course, this was also several years ago, and it's possible the bug has been fixed. Maybe I should try Wayland again.
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?
So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).
Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.
Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).
Is that correct?
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
This part is too broad.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.
Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.
Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.
The fewer legitimate organizations posting on twitter, drawing eyes and views to the site, the better.
This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.
> The Numbers Aren't Working Out
I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]
I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
[1] https://www.thebulwark.com/p/yes-elon-musk-vote-buying-is-ag...
[2] https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffre...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
The fact that my post got flagged (edit: now unflagged) is maybe indicative that the differing viewpoint is the concern.
Back in the day if you saw a blue checkmark they were either celebrities, politicians, or journalists. And they were always featured heavily in the old Twitter trending algorithm. The checkmark also made their Tweets standout among the plebs.
What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.
That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
No one has asserted this.
If your views suck, people have the freedom to say "ok, bye".
(Musk asserts otherwise, of course. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...)
So I'm not free to assert moral reasons for my actions?
On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.
Because what I read is that their X posts are getting only 3% of the engagement compared to pre-Musk Twitter.
The post insinuates that's because the platform intentionally down-ranks posts for ideological purposes.
Well done trivializing being against white supremacy.
If you want to give EFF more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
and
> Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.
You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites:
> people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day
Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.
Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.
Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.
Please stick to your charter my friends.
Which is fine but just be honest about it.
Anyway,
> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.
On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.
https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a
"As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor."
One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.
I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"
You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."
That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.
Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"???
It was often as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies.
Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.
You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note,
> Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices
> Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs
With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think"
Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.)
[1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political).
Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis
Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
Their demands like "genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages" are not met for many of the other platforms they are staying on.
Then you have lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
There's one particular website that they don't like, and they see declining engagement from, so they leave. There's other websites that might have less engagement, but they do like it, so they stay there. Then there's other websites that might have similar ideological disdain for, but they get very broad reach from, so they reluctantly stay.
I really don't see what the big deal is with trying to reach a broad audience.
Let's be honest and look at the engagement numbers of the post announcing this:
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
These numbers, combined with the facts that Mastodon and BlueSky are aligned with internet freedoms while X is strongly aligned against internet freedoms, make for a clear-and-cut case that it's past time to leave the platform.
(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)
And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.
Maybe I need to re-evaluate some of the youtube people that I stopped watching because they were so carefully neutral, not wanting to offend the nazis, I thought. Perhaps that's just american culture to try to avoid politics at all cost and I shouldn't view it like they sympathize with that camp?
(To provide context, I'm from the Netherlands. I know we sit, ehm, 'far right' on the honesty spectrum but I hadn't the impression that American culture was very different in that regard, at least if you adjust the scales of pleasantries and exuberism to our usual range, which this EFF post has none of)
Edit: what u/ceejayoz said downthread <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706961> could be the answer: it is about the numbers, but you have to offset them for how many other people think you're an ass for being there. Nobody thinks you're an ass if you're on Mastodon, you're just posting to whatever server you think fits your niche best, so even if that were only a few thousand views per post then that math might work out to better publicity than ten times as many views and hanging out on X.com
I think that says it all.
If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.
It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.
Also, I don’t think the kind of engagement X’s algorithms reward would be good for the EFF’s image as a serious organization.
They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is ideological!
Both Bluesky and Mastodon are open/federated networks, which aligns more with EFF's values. So, yes, but I don't think for the reasons you're hinting at.
It would be dishonest of them to pretend they were not ideological. Staying on Twitter was likely worse for their mission then leaving it.
What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.
Huh? This sounds like you mean before elon "free speech!" musk but I can only imagine that, if it ever was a thing, it was a thing after. At some point a competitor's links were being blocked, a little 'oops'ie with 'the algorithm' of course. Facebook also pulled some of those over the years. I don't know about outright bans though, especially concerning Twitter before Musk
At most, X only serves as a marketing/fundraising mechanism. Nothing more. And the EFF doesn't really need to do that as I'm certain their victories and fights will still be shared on X without them.
Does this not apply to X users?
Staying on platform to comment on bad things that are happening is far more valuable than "but there are bad people here and musk bad"
If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.
It's clear this is about politics, and I'm not opposed to that, Elon is not awesome, but trying to justify it otherwise seems kind of shady.
Ignoring people of any demographic or political persuasion would be a serious strategic mistake in my opinion.
Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.
But that is actually what they called out: they're not getting eyes anymore. Views at X have cratered so hard that it's barely worth the time.
I find it really hard to believe that even with lower views on X than the past, that it's literally not worth the tiny about of effort to get their messages posted there.
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
There's more ROI posting on BlueSky or Mastodon, even ignoring the fact that BlueSky and Mastodon are projects clearly more aligned with internet freedom than X is.
(edited for clarity)
It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.
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.
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.
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.
You think those people are on X?
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.
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
Seriously, if you're working on anything worthwhile, you can wait for the weekly digest. Everything else just seems like hyperiding.
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
Correct me if I'm wrong: I'm asserting that having a principle is an inalienable belief that actually guides behavior, not selectively applies to behavior.
Though generally: yes, I agree: get off twitter, and I'd go a step further and say..minimize all social media involvement.
I'm more astounded that people think every single part of it is a cesspool when in reality there are gems to be found that aren't in any other X alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon or (lol) Threads.
The net result is that X shows breaking news, in the same way that the (infamous) meme of bullet holes marked on the WWII plane only shows part of the story - the people who have departed the platform aren't posting, and thus X is only breaking news from a subset of people.
This might be fine for certain types of topics. For understanding the zeitgeist on culture and politics, though, you can't filter your way towards hearing from voices that are no longer posting at all.
I used to be a regular donor to EFF but stopped when it became clear they had lost sight of their mission.
Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.
They do this in almost every tweet.
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'm on Twitter/X, but none of the other social media sites they list (I mean, I'm on LinkedIn, but not in any sort of regular way). So their reach to me personally is diminished. Obviously I'll still go on their website if I want to keep up with their activities and I'll probably still hear relevant news about them though.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
Don't get me started on tiktok...
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.
But then there's no explanation really.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?
If you don't that is fine but I imagine you would also hold the view that not posting on X shouldn't be controversial then either.
When you say "Be real", you're pleading with people to take your statement more seriously. But it's simply the case that people have very strong and negative opinions about nazis and child pornography.
But i would bet social media managers use similar tools, and the fact that no one can access twitter API might add just the little bit of friction you want to avoid.
That being said, there is no disguise.
I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
Comical.
> It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.
How about their website, which is accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to log in?
Sure, just like he was pro-free speech, until he suddenly wasn't.
His broken promise not to ban @elonjet is still up. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Further, Elon said he considered it free speech he was deliberately protecting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
There's a reason cryptographers laud Signal (the protocol) over MTProto (Telegram's protocol), and Signal (the app) over Telegram (the app). Telegram is not E2EE by default, does not have E2EE for group chats, and does not have a good crpytographic protocol, and Musk has long been rallying against Signal.
Under Elon Musk, DOGE exfiltrated and breached American's data from the major government agencies they broke into, exfiltrated information to private databases (with DOGE employees leaving with flashdrives), Russian IPs accessing NLRB systems with provided credentials, and we're even seeing DOGE's once-alleged US citizen master-database project come to proposal as a DHS project under the SAVE act.
In just a year, Musk and DOGE helped to expand the US government's mass surveillance capacity beyond what we've ever seen. This is not surprising, since Elon Musk is aligned with the United States fascist movement, and mass surveillance is a hallmark of fascism.
We have a much stronger surveillance state, owing to DOGE and Musk.
There are probably things more relevant about X than what it is that Elon Musk currently proclaims about his political opinions?
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
No thanks.
Whats is worse, censorship or that only those with money are heard? Who do you think is doing the dividing and conquering? Not everything is political, sometimes it's just a rort.
Elon is pro-censorship for the things he doesn’t like, like the word “cis”.
You can be happy that Elon is allowing alt-right speech, that’s fair, he has brought that back to Twitter, slurs are finally allowed again, truly the speech we all long for, but anti-censorship as a principle? Please. Pull the other one.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.... Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. These platforms host mutual aid networks and serve as hubs for political organizing, cultural expression, and community care. Just deleting the apps isn't always a realistic or accessible option, and neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like... Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information."
Obvious political bias. If we can't talk across the aisle, we're doomed.
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.
AFAIK Reddit is the last mainstream social media site with such niceities, even mbasic.facebook.com is gone as of 2024.
That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.
One thing that has certainly changed is that algorithms have become more aggressive. If your content isn't performing well, it gets hidden much faster and more aggressively than before. This makes sense when you consider it from the PoV of the platforms (they have much more content to choose from)
Not saying it's working, but I believe something like that is their current design intent of that joke of a massive backwards revolver. The way it currently works is that only those smart enough to bypass the penalization wins.
EFF reps on Twitter probably aren't "smart enough" to game that system, so they stay in the tiny group, and therefore they won't get the views.
The EFF is at odds with both facets of the current US administration as well as the big corporate donors in its pockets and its posts deal with nuanced topics, and so naturally its posts are among those not surfaced as often.
A decade ago they lost the plot. They pulled some bullshit and lied to their entire membership in order to boost their cronies/friends at the Library of Congress. They framed efforts to keep the LoC under loose Congressional/Presidential oversight and free to do as they want as some Anti-Trump fight. Requests about why they would do this went completely unanswered to the membership.
The EFF Board serves their own goals and believe themselves unaccountable to their membership, so they no longer get my money and I no longer entertain or signal boost their message.
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly?
I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets.
I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.
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.
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?
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.
Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.
It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".
>We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.
They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time.
Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.
It's even more likely that Twitter's audience in 2018 was fairly supportive of the EFF's goals, but X's audience in 2026 is either indifferent or hostile.
As they put it:
> X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
More “X is simply not worth our time anymore”. I can’t say with any certainty that X is on a death spiral (personally it does feel that way), but the kind of crowd who have remained in spite of Musk’s many public embarrassments (and the handling of Grok deep fakes and women) probably aren’t the kind who are passionate about the EFF
I don't know the numbers for EFF, but having 400K followers on X and getting between zero and five comments per post if you go back a couple of weeks (to skip today's fire), between zero and 20 retweets... sounds like a failed platform. They get better numbers from Facebook, a dying platform, with half the followers. They get similar or better numbers from Instagram with less than 10% of the followers they have in Twitter.
Or they're tweeting something their followers don't care enough about to engage with, so the platform stops funneling their post to other followers.
Again, youtubers complain about this same kind of thing regularly. It's almost always just a 'you' problem, your content is simply not engaging.
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.
All of this misery started when psychopaths like you started ruining peoples careers just for fun, Bryan Cantrill of Oxide.
I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTok
They go on to say they're still on Facebook and TikTok and explain:
> The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance.
None of this is unique to Facebook and TikTok and not for X.
> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day
I'm pretty sure all these demographics use X as well.
It's just so bizarre. If you want to reach people, esp people that maybe come from a different perspective from you, why would you opt out of the best way to get your message across?
That's easy to sustain.
Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
There are many accounts that show the flight paths but on a 24h delay. I see that as reasonable. It allows you to do view the data but there is no security risk.
Meanwhile people were banned off twitter for saying "men are not women".
Yes, a "free-speech absolutist" who explicitly promised to preserve a very specific example of free speech on explicit free speech grounds immediately banned the account when he was able to.
And then he banned reporters for reporting on it.
It's the easiest possible example to demonstrate his principles were never genuine here.
See also: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1993828797066748081
> Falsely labeling non-violent people as “fascist” or “Nazi” should be treated as incitement to murder
That's not very free speech, right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
if you want to be an activist, take these weird positions
the guy on gab is also a human being with the same number of rights and deserving of the same empathy, freedoms, representation, etc. as the trendy oppressed group on instagram but is generally treated as dirty
obviously i am not suggesting that they post on low traffic platforms, but everything substantial and important happens on x, believing otherwise is delusional
just shows that these groups are not as egalitarian as they purport to be
This 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).
How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.
>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.
> We called for:
> - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles
> - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages
> - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability.
Of course not.
And yet they leave X and only X.
Twitter account bans had always been so broken that account bans, account ban evasions, tweet deboosting avoidance, etc. has all, long, been natural parts of life on it, since at least 2010s. I might as well argue that it would not have gone so far "down", psychologically, to the point that its old management would have sold the entire thing to Musk and for people to genuinely believe in positive outcome under him.
The very least you guys could have done it is to recognize the fact that inconsistent, unclear, unenforced policies of old Twitter existed && are not consistent with yours. You guys don't even do that. How even.
It's usually couched in sophisticated-sounding faux-intellectual language, though, which is the key to posting whatever you want here. You can say literally anything on HN, so long as you camouflage it with SV techbro vernacular.
It must be some "ist" of you to assume it isn't transmisandry instead.
(And not sure that anything related to gender identity specifically divorced from sex is "sexism.")
This means your threshold is fairly low.
You're allowed to have those opinions, of course. We can talk about other things.
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.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
We used to use it back then because it was a pretty open system, you could famously do analysis on Hashtags, it was even a fad in the scientific community to do sentiment analysis on some topics, twitter was like the Drosophila Melanogaster. The tech stack was very public as well and it had that startup vibe to it. Even presidents were registering on the platform due to its neutrality, which made sense back then.
Nowadays the company was acquired, and acquired not by a nameless penny pinching fund, but by a personalist company who might have bought it for personal, not economic reasons. They were involved in the executive power and did a similar kind of personnel cut and regime change. The presidents now use it, but now people use Twitter because presidents are on it, rather than the other way around.
It still has some professionals in it, and it's relaxed and addictive nature allows me to interact with professionals I wouldn't have a chance to on uptight Linkedin. But meh, it's not like sharing a shitpost with a CEO of a cool startup is going to be my ticket to stardom anyway, if anything it's a bad signal "Hey, remember me? I responded to your tweet about AI with a cool factoid while you wiped your ass on the toilet!" who gives a shit.
Hopefully I too will leave twitter some day, some day.
Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed
X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.
Community Notes did happen without X. It was a feature introduced in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch.
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-bir...
Twitter’s acquisition only started over a year later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
Well - Musk ruined Twitter. As to why ... that is hard to say. I would claim he did so on purpose, but the guy also has some mental problems. And with this I really mean problems aside from his antics. Everyone sees that when he mass-fired people at DOGE or did a certain greeting twice with his right arm (everyone understands his mentality), on top of being a billionaire which already means he is fighting the Average Joe. But irrelevant of the reasons, I think we can safely conclude: Musk ruined Twitter. X does not work and I don't think he can turn this around, even if he'd want to. People don't want oligarchs in the front row; I'd even claim they don't want them in the back row either, but it is clear that Musk's ego causes a TON of damage everywhere he is involved. Tesla sinking is also attributable to Musk; only SpaceX hasn't sunk yet, but Musk has a talent to sink stuff, so who knows.
Even before Musk, Twitter had problems. I noticed this when I tried to make statements and Twitter tried to censor me, claiming the content I wrote is not good aka harmful. This kind of censorship is similar to reddit; I retired from reddit a while ago, the reason was excessive censorship by crazy moderators. In two years I had about 76k karma on reddit, so what I wrote is, for the most part, appreciated by a majority, give or take. Evidently you can't write interesting content all of the time, but in two years +70k karma is not bad. Then some moderator comes in, claims I broke a rule, locks me out of 3 days - I can not accept censorship, sorry. I don't want moderators acting as gatekeepers. Musk with X kind of made this even worse. Now you have to log in to read stuff? Old twitter did not require this, right? They clearly want to sniff people's activity. With age sniffing (age verification) coming up and infiltrating (some) linux distributions, I am really getting mighty tired of billionaires paying homage to crazy dictators who killed a gazillion of people. Musk is like Scrooge McDuck, but much more evil and selfish.
EFF should have quit when Musk bought Twitter. But I think we need to get rid of corporations who keep on selling out the users to some other, bigger corporation. That thing is clearly not working at all.
Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.
Why?
(It's also buying into the narrative that X is a ideological monolith. It, of course, is not. But it does lean a different way than other major social media platforms, which means there's a unique opportunity to speak to a different kind of audience!)
meeting people where they are doesn’t inherently mean you support where they are. You just meet the people themselves.
It’s not like X is really gaining anything from the EFF, so it feels a little bit performative. Sure.
For twitter and EFF, it's a work account, so probably 2FA with a timeout. You have to connect to it, pass the 2FA, then click, then copy paste. Or you can just log in to your tool, and post simultaneously on linkedin/mastodon (i don't know about the others, never used them). If your tool is well integrated, you can also just post on your company blog, and all social media wiht a public API are updated at the same time. TBH i don't really use social media, but i understand the "it's not big enough to loose 10 minutes each day, let's drop it if they don't fix their shitty API".
Then again, who cares one way or the other?
explain
What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right.
What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.
> Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over?
That’s like asking “would activists fight for your rights if no one was violating them”. I mean, no, but that doesn’t say anything. Had Twitter not have been sold but they eventually did the same things Elon did, then the EFF would probably have left just the same. Had Elon taken over but not done what he did, they probably wouldn’t have. The EFF is not on a personal vendetta, this is about the service as it is right now.
Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.
That is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
> EFF has changed
> EFF was fairly neutral ... Last year, they began ... I saw them becoming more and more partisan
I mean, I read that as a shift.
Oppression of minorities? Check
Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state? Check
Imprisoning dissenting voices? Check
Creating lists of people to get rid of? Check
Authoritarianism? Double check
Creating an out group and scapegoating it as an "enemy from within" Check
if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it doesn't have to scream it's a duck and sieg heil to be sure it's probably a duck or at least not a swan
There have been a lot of political prosecutions of people who disagree. James Comey, Leticia James, John Bolton, Mark Kelly. Luckily, grand juries and judges have prevented them from getting convictions. But dragging them through the legal process is punishment enough. The administration's incompetence at imprisoning political opponents isn't a reason to forgive them.
ICE has targeted protestors, and Rubio made it clear the targeting was intentional policy.
If we look beyond "imprisonment" and include "illegally or unfairly punish dissenting voices to keep them from having a voice," there are a lot more victims. Jimmy Kimmel, reporters at the Pentagon, openly supporting an ally's takeover of Warner Brothers to control CNN.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_government_attacks...
>what the fuck does "Capitalism as the main apparatus of the state"
It means the states de-facto purpose is to funnel wealth into the hands of a few people (trump and elon included)
>What minorities are being oppressed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...
>what list of people exist to get rid of
ICE presumably has several
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/activists-sue-san-francis... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-activists-demonstrate... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-alert-eff-argues-ag... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/trumps-blocking-people-hi... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/comprehensive-legal-refor...
And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
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".
"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.
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
If you just want to talk about how much you hate the current US administration with other people who also spend all their time talking about how much they hate the current US administration, there are much better places for that, such as r/politics.
Elon Musk takes effective control of government functions by bribing incoming President, uses power to close investigations into his driverless car technology that is currently running amok on city streets causing death and destruction: not technology related, off topic and uninteresting. Downvote and flag.