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.
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’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.
Don't get me started on tiktok...
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.
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.
(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.
> 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 think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.
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.
>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.
Lol, rubbish.
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.
Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not 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.
Which is fine but just be honest about it.
Does this not apply to X users?
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.
The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
They do this in almost every tweet.
Assuming they use the same principles everywhere, they're getting more views on Mastodon and Bluesky? That is surprising.
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.
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?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
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
I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?
Opposed to mass surveillance??
And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").
No thanks.
There are probably things more relevant about X than what it is that Elon Musk currently proclaims about his political opinions?
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.
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.
It's even more likely that Twitter's audience in 2018 was fairly supportive of the EFF's goals, but X's audience in 2026 is either indifferent or hostile.
As they put it:
> X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
I don't 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.
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
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.
That's easy to sustain.
Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456
Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/25/elon-mu...
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...
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.
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.
> 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 think those people are on X?
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.
I think I lasted <1 week after this takeover.
That being said, there is no disguise.
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".
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?”
I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
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.
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.
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.
(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)
I think that says it all.
What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.
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.
Still, I'd advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.
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.
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.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...
The old Twitter was way more of an echo chamber than it is now
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.
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
> 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.
What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.
And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.
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.
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.
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.
I applaud the move and only wish they would have done it sooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...
I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."
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?
Of course not.
And yet they leave X and only X.
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.
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.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fixing.
We called for:
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. 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.
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members’ support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we’re here to help you take back control.
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
> The Numbers Aren't Working Out
I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
Maybe they were also getting flamed really hard on Twitter. Idk, haven't used that site in forever.
I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note,
> Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices
> Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs
With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think"
Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.)
[1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"
The "were usually" is doing a lot of lifting.
Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"???
It was as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies.
Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.
They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
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.
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?
No they weren't:
"There are only two genders."
"Men cannot become pregnant."
"Children should not be given sterilization drugs."
"Deporting illegal immigrants is a good thing."
Just because you disagree with them doesn't make it "violent hate speech".
You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."
If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis
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).
It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
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 spoke years talking about oppression Olympics can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.