Discussion

EFF is Leaving X

Ir0nMan: This reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.

ericmay: It just seems like they are unhappy with the algorithm, and like any customer for any service you can cancel service, say why you are canceling service, and move to alternatives especially when your concerns aren't addressed.Then again, who cares one way or the other?

staplers: We all perform everyday. Those performances eventually become our identity and influence our actions.

mort96: > you could just post less or use it for major updatesWhy?

bko: > Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimesIs the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition? Is X more heavily censored than Facebook or TikTokThey 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 dayI'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?

ceejayoz: > Is the contention here that there is more censorship on X compared to Twitter pre acquisition?That's easy to sustain.Pre-acquisition: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589414958508691456Post-acquisition: https://x.com/elonjet

rockemsockem: I'm not sure you understand the definition of the word "more". A single example does not prove "more".

ceejayoz: There are lots of similar examples.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...

tomalbrc: To talk to a botnet? no thanks. You can decide to just not feed into twitter.

anonymousiam: I left EFF last year. I was a top-tier donor for 20 years, but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. Leaving X is just another example of it. Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over? Does EFF actually believe that there's more free speech on Facebook?

blurbleblurble: Your comment is an example of questionable political activism

crims0n: I don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?

busterarm: No, they even would get money for the engagement they get. This is purely moral grandstanding disguised as something else.

Polarity: left this nazi portal back when elon bought it.

ApolloFortyNine: This reads like the classic Youtuber whose annoyed their views dropped (this almost always amounts to 'people don't actually like your content as much as you thought').>We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time.Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.

dpweb: However if you view your content as valuable and the algorithm does not anymore, it's probably not the best platform for you to be on.

ks2048: > To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.

jpadkins: Old twitter embraced bots and counting bot impressions. X is more truth seeking, and hard line against bots and follower pumping.

realusername: I would bet the opposite, Twitter was already a small competitor compared to Facebook and never reached its popularity, switching the audience to the far right likely cut down even more of what was left.

dijit: because it’s a marketing channel/feed, just like any other.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.

feature20260213: LOSERS

numpad0: > We called for: > - Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles > - Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages > - Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability. Makes sense. Especially the point 1 and 3 had been long-standing issues for Twitter since before the acquisition, and the situation had worsened since - only except that means to those became successively more adorably braindead.

kjksf: Are they getting that from Bluesky? Mastodon? LinkedIn? Instagram? TikTok? Facebook?Of course not.And yet they leave X and only X.

mghackerlady: Because those aren't occupied by horrible people. Freedom is intersectional, you can't fight for freedom while indirectly supporting the oppression of others. Sometimes, the benefits of more eyeballs are worth it but there aren't enough people left on twitter for it to be worth supporting

Ajedi32: Their logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...

mghackerlady: there isn't enough people left there to be worth the tradeoff

Ajedi32: 13 million impressions a year isn't enough to be worth copy-pasting a few posts from Facebook?

ceejayoz: Not if enough folks think your posting there is a sign you're an ass.If you hang out in a bar with KKK memorabilia everywhere - and open the replies of any reasonably popular news story on X before complaining that's not a fair comparison - people make conclusions off your presence, even if you're personally there for the tasty beer.

loeg: No one thinks that. This is an extremely online leftwing blooskie echo chamber point of view.

numpad0: [delayed]

mellosouls: If they justify it in terms of reach and impressions then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely ideological.Which is fine but just be honest about it.

watwut: The article is honest and open about reasons.What is dishonest is to write as if there was something wrong with leaving twittwr for "ideological" reasons.

orwin: I've coded a 3rd party tool that could post to mastodon/twitter at the same time around 2020 (plenty of idle time during covid). I lost twitter API access, never bothered to try to make it work again (i hate working with interface clickers). to be clear, i don't really post on social media, it was just an experiment because i had faaar too much time and thought at the time that this kind of product could be interesting.But i would bet social media managers use similar tools, and the fact that no one can access twitter API might add just the little bit of friction you want to avoid.

mghackerlady: They're leaving because the platform because of a combination of not enough real people and elon turning it into a nazi hellscape. The visibility isn't worth the hit to brand reputation which makes sense if you recognise liberty as intersectional

brindidrip: There must be another reason other than the cost of effort versus value of impressions, especially when you can automate these things.AH... there it is: Kenyatta Thomas Social Media and Video Manager As the Social Media and Video Manager at EFF, Kenyatta Thomas leads the creation of digital content that educates and mobilizes the public across EFF's online platforms. They come to EFF from a background in youth and reproductive justice advocacy and organizing, having previously worked with organizations such as Physicians for Reproductive Health, the National Network of Abortion Funds, Reproaction, and Advocates for Youth. Their work as a sex educator and abortion doula informs their deep commitment to community care, access to information, and tech equity. Kenyatta believes in the transformative power of digital tools to advance justice and is committed to making online spaces more inclusive, accessible, and empowering for all.

halestock: There what is?

kevincrane: Just to clarify, until recently you were under the impression that the political advocacy organization you donated to had no political opinions of their own?

Brendinooo: That statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns that they value more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc).Through that lens, I guess it makes sense that they see TikTok, Instagram, and BlueSky as worth their time and presence but not X.

bakugo: Agreed. The fact that their Threads account[0] is still active (remember that site? yeah, me neither, I had forgotten it existed until I saw it linked on eff.org's socials page) makes it clear that the opening statement about "the numbers not working out" is deceptive.You have to scroll down a bit further to find their real reason for preferring those sites:> people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day[0] https://www.threads.com/@efforg

r2_pilot: I'm sorry, you didn't say anything about your reasoning behind your ad hominem attack, so I can't properly evaluate your point. I eagerly await your clarification as to the relevance of your observation with regards to this HN topic.

bko: That's where you draw the line? Does a social media allow you to dox the owner's location? A true test of free speech!There are many accounts that show the flight paths but on a 24h delay. I see that as reasonable. It allows you to do view the data but there is no security risk.Meanwhile people were banned off twitter for saying "men are not women".

subjectsigma: There was never any security risk, the flight data was and is public information. You should be able to say “men are not women” and also repost public data. Stop pretending Elon cares about free speech.

SAI_Peregrinus: Brand reputation. Every brand that chooses to use X implicitly supports X, even if they're not verified & paying X money.

crims0n: Going against the network effect out of principal doesn't seem to be a winning strategy when the goal is to raise awareness about issues.

feature20260213: Not parent but they had relatively neutral stances and got infected with TDS / EDS et al. as of late. I also was a long time supporter and privacy advocate and canceled my support for them because they started getting political.

mghackerlady: TDS/EDS don't exist, it's called not liking fascists and not supporting them any more than you have to because they directly oppose your goals

davidw: My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology.They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments.I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.

ryandrake: It's shocking how quickly the "ideology" got normalized. Yes, the Klan has always had pockets of the country where they could march without getting their asses kicked, and there have always been those handful of weird uncles who kept their Nazi beliefs to themselves, but back in the 90s if you flew a swastika flag or Heil Hitlered in public, you were asking for an immediate beat-down and would probably be ostracized from society. But suddenly, within the span of 10 years, it's all out in the open, from the inbred yokels all the way up to the richest man on the planet. Something seems to have happened, say 10 or so years ago, that somehow unmasked everyone all at once. Trying to figure out what it might have been...

holmesworcester: To be fair, the thing that made it a Nazi salute was probably on the viewer's side more than anything else.Other more typical public figures, including prominent dems, have done the same gesture and it did not land this way.That said, people having such a strong association between Musk and "Nazi" that they would be predisposed to this mental leap was totally (by Musk) avoidable and indicates a deeper issue with his public political positioning and personal brand.Moral of story: don't touch Trump with an any-sized pole.

codeflo: Nothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).

markkitti: I had the exact same experience.

jesse_dot_id: Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.

SecretDreams: You'd be surprised how easy it is for people to compartmentalize their principles. Many do it day to day every time they purchase something online that was probably made using less than ideal labour practices.Still, is advocate to leave social media in general. And certainly to get off twitter.

nailer: The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is A modern day organisation dedicated solely to freedom of expression including digitallyhttps://www.fire.org/

noosphr: Probably more reasonable.I'm not sure why xorg exists if their sole purpose is to kill x. As per the many posts by their developers.

rockemsockem: This seems completely unnecessary and performative. I have a hard time understanding how reducing their reach could possibly be helpful to the goals of the organization. I'm definitely going to keep donating to them, but I'm concerned.

ruszki: How do you know that they reduce their reach to their target audience in any considerable way? According to their article their reach on X is about 3% of what was 7 years ago, and god knows how much is bot from those 3%.

matt-attack: Wow I never thought the org I’ve donated to all these years to fight for digital rights would find the need to use the phrase “queer folks”. What a toxic mess.Please stick to your charter my friends.

oulipo2: Technology IS political. If you don't understand this, perhaps try reading books?

blurbleblurble: I just wanna remind people that this website is full of elon's drones and bots who mob flagged any criticism of DOGE for months on end. A lot of the "outrage" expressed in this discussion is likely faux.

tikhonj: Ah yes, a non-profit reaching out to a broader audience for its activism is clearly a "certain ideological concern" separate from their core mission.

jaronilan: Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU

txrx0000: This is unfortunate. Elon despite his flaws opposes mass surveillance and censorship, and that's the general sentiment on X at the moment. He just retweeted the Telegram founder 20 hours ago. [0]I'm afraid we're being divided and conquered. The people pushing for mass control are attempting to reframe the fight for digital freedoms as a "leftist" talking point, so that they can later ride the populist wave and use its momentum to kill online free speech and general purpose computing altogether. Perhaps the EFF has been compromised, because it should not be falling for this trick. It would be wise to use all of the information channels available to reach as many people as possible.[0] https://nitter.net/durov/status/2041979377773133898#m

rangerelf: This is to laughably misguided that it leans toward malicious.I mean, you're talking about Elon, the Doge guy, the one who organized mass hoovering of citizens data from whatever sources he could get his grubby mitts on? That Elon?Opposed to mass surveillance??And then you sprinkle some commonly known truths on top to make your comment palatable ("we're being divided and conquered!"), and finally you add a dash of malicious speculation to seed some doubt against the organization ("Perhaps the EFF has been compromised!! It's a trick!!").No thanks.

subjectsigma: It is malicious, and you shouldn’t be downvoted for calling out someone who is so obviously arguing in bad faith.

txrx0000: Not arguing in bad faith. Go read my past comments. I'm pretty consistent on this.

oulipo2: At long last. It should be the case with everybody.Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed

highmastdon: What do you mean _exactly_? Covering your statement is a shroud of vagueness doesn’t help form an opinion, only infuse more polarisation

madeofpalk: They're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence.Anyway,> Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users’ rights. That changed. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x

243341286: Yet they had no problem with the censorship of conservative opinions during the Biden era.

mghackerlady: Conservative opinions like "[group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy" and "we need a white homeland"If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis

mghackerlady: freedom is intersectional. it's hard to fight for freedom while supporting those that actively limit the freedom of others, especially when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for

nailer: No it is absolutely not. You don’t have a freedom to make anyone else agree with or believe in your views because that tramples over the other person’s freedom of thought.

kushalpandya: That too would very likely be seen as deeply political.

Ir0nMan: This reads as very performative. You don't have to choose between posting 10 times a day or deleting your account; you could just post less or use it for major updates.

lxgr: But then how would I know where to get more regular updates as somebody following them there? It used to be a bannable offense to even link to your presence on a competing side; not sure if it still is.

cabirum: So uh, could impressions decrease across the board, not only on X. Like, social platforms have peaked years ago and the downward trend is completely organic.

AlexAplin: We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-...

Legend2440: The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization.Of course they care about ideological concerns.

Brendinooo: Where in my comment did I claim otherwise?

slg: You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual distinction between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.

benatkin: Based and Zuck-pilled.

loeg: Does anyone seriously think EFF posting to X yesterday tarnished their brand? Be real.

AlexAplin: The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.

nostrademons: I had the opposite impression, that this decision was primarily economic in nature. People (or at least the sort of people interested in the EFF) simply aren't on X/Twitter anymore, and so it's not worth posting there.

hombre_fatal: I think there are better things to dismiss Elon for, like his role in getting Trump elected, the misinfo tweets he reposts with "Exactly" and "Concerning" (where the top community note trivially debunks the tweet -- he doesn't care whether it's real), making a stink about the Epstein files until he was cool with Trump again, promoting right-wing slop like Gunther Eagleman.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.

satvikpendem: Lots of good discussion there still if you follow the right people and block certain categories of discussion. If you use lists then you'll see no suggested content beyond who you follow.I'm more astounded that people think every single part of it is a cesspool when in reality there are gems to be found that aren't in any other X alternative like Bluesky or Mastodon or (lol) Threads.

Lord_Zero: This is a poor take. "You can make this mismanaged steaming pile of bot-infested garbage better if you just filter everything!"

daft_pink: Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120

dgacmu: It is, but the other one is a link to their twitter post, whereas this is the longer self-hosted statement. This is a better, more informative source.

daft_pink: Just noting it. The other post was submitted earlier. The mod's can figure out how to combine/reconcile. Update: I think you are correct and this one won :)

ryandrake: Anyone who doesn't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute, I encourage you to watch the video over and over, enough times so that you can memorize and replicate it, then go into work and do it in front of your manager, and see what happens.

fooey: he literally paraphrased the 14 words after doing it"It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured."it's an absolute joke anyone disputes what he did

greenavocado: "freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with." and the impressions line at the end is basically admitting it was never about principles, it was about clout. you didn't leave the platform because of ethics, you left because the algorithm stopped paying you for it.

mghackerlady: >"freedom is intersectional" is a fancy way of saying "I only support freedom for people I agree with."That is the exact opposite of what that means. It means freedom should be supported for all, especially for the oppressed. Those who stand for oppression in one way serve to benefit other forms of oppression

greenavocado: cool, so in theory it means freedom for all. in practice it's being used here to justify cutting ties with people you disagree with. you can't say "freedom for everyone" and "I won't associate with those people" in the same breath and not see the tension.

cryptoegorophy: Are they leaving because of low views? This means they are more concerned about views than anything else? I thought any sane company wants as much exposure anywhere no matter the political stance or other views.

Brendinooo: > freedom is intersectionalWhat is your working definition of freedom?

aeternum: Being ideological doesn't make it okay to lie.I had respect for the EFF but this post is very disingenuous. Makes it seem like the decision is based on numbers yet they share no impression numbers for the other platforms.Seems like they've become just another NGO with a hidden agenda.

causal: What is the agenda? You're hinting at some conspiracy but I have no idea what it could even be

MSFT_Edging: Those "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. There was no shortage of "conservative opinions" pre-buyout.I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.

fourseventy: People were getting banned from Twitter for saying "Men can't get pregnant", or is that against the TOS?

rapax: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."What was wrong with just saying people instead of this nonsense? EFF has been a joke for a while now so has every organization that does something for people. It's just a box that can be ticked when someone asks something stupid like "who protects some imaginary rights".

SimianSci: Your comment on vagueness misses its mark.> 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.

geertj: What exactly has Elon done to limit your freedom? For me, Elon has increased my freedom because I can read about certain viewpoints that were previously censored on Twitter.

ghshephard: I was recently at a brown bag at work - regarding enablement of AI in the workplace (it was awesome - all over the roadmap) - and one of the audience asked the speakers (a very diverse group of people) how on earth they keep up with all the developments in AI?All six of the speakers immediately said Twitter was realistically the only place you can keep up with the conversation. Having an extensively curated list means that anytime anything breaks (and often a few hours before) you are going to hear about it on X/Twitter.I would love to know if there is anything even close to the reach of X. It has a lot of problems - but if you want to track breaking news, I can't think of anything else close to it.

ceejayoz: It's even clearer if you put it next to a clip of Hitler.https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1i6par1/elon_musk_vs_...

mindslight: "Oh, I must have missed seeing you at the corporate retreat! Put yourself on my calendar so we can talk about your promotion."

jdashg: I do, yeah. Hope that helps!

MidnightRider39: I mean it’s always been an outlet of a popular Silicon Valley VC. As the US sinks more and more into despotism, those controlling Silicon Valley are just enablers of that despotism.

cycomanic: I think that's the point. The owner of X as well as most of the remaining denizens are actively working on taking away the freedom of others to believe in their own views and make them adhere to their beliefs.

greenavocado: actively working on taking away the freedom of others to believe in their own views is an unhinged thing to say about a social media platform you can simply not use. no one on x is reaching into your brain and rearranging your beliefs. you're describing a website with a vibe you don't like and acting like it's a reeducation camp.

contagiousflow: I can't believe such a nonpolitical organization would do this!!! Come on, you either have to be lying or you were never paying attention.https://www.eff.org/press/releases/activists-sue-san-francis... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-activists-demonstrate... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/media-alert-eff-argues-ag... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/law-enforcement-use-face-... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/trumps-blocking-people-hi... https://www.eff.org/press/releases/comprehensive-legal-refor...

lux-lux-lux: You’re a little behind the times, mate.Threads has more daily active users than X and is growing quickly vs. the latter’s cratering usage rates. Demographics trend younger, too.

satvikpendem: DAU for Threads is misleading, Meta seems to count impressions in Instagram where Threads sections sometimes show up. I personally know no one who uses Threads.

helaoban: >Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.Does this not apply to X users?

pjc50: The reach and impressions on Twitter are fake though, and posts containing links are suppressed.(Of course the EFF are ideological, that's their entire purpose!)

rockskon: Sometimes it's not just about quantity. Not all impressions are equal.And like it or not - Twitter is still the preferred communication platform of quite a few influential people.

lux-lux-lux: Interactions on X are notoriously low-quality and botted to hell, so “not all impressions are equal” might not be a great point to push here.

bluebarbet: But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed.

moralestapia: >"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?">Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.Lol, rubbish.

bakugo: Posts about US politics that have nothing to do with technology and are otherwise uninteresting get flagged because HN is not the place for that.https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> Off-Topic: Most stories about politicsIf 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.

throwawaypath: >Those "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech.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".

tptacek: That's explicitly not the logic EFF is using; they come close to outright rejecting it.

jasonlotito: > ... when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for> The Numbers Aren't Working OutI don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?

tptacek: They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they don't agree with.

triceratops: Which ones?

pavlov: In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas.If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”

AlecSchueler: > pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feedsHe'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.

pirate787: It's grossly unfair to conflate white nationalism and white supremacy. Your grandparents lived in a state that was close to 100% european descent, meanwhile in a couple generations there will only be a handful of small european majority countries left in the world. I don't think you have any idea how your grandparents would react in today's world of ethnic replacement.

ryanmcbride: Do you believe that boycotting is a new behavior?

Brendinooo: You might be right; I don't know what the broad populace thinks of what EFF does.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?

smaudet: It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul.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).

pmdr: > We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on XYeah, 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.

dreambuffer: How useful are those people to the EFF? If anything, platforms like that will negatively polarise those people away from the EFF, not towards it. You don't want negative publicity in this environment, things have changed.

CodeWriter23: "Hate speech" is an epithet employed by those with no substantial counterargument.

maxbond: It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an obsevable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has always been complicated and negotiated.

chaosharmonic: You're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about being let down by Mike Pence specifically.

satvikpendem: Those people would have long left X though so I'm not sure why the existing people would think that. If you're talking about external people judging them about posting there, no one thinks that, like the sibling comment mentions. People will just think at worst that they might need the reach of X so they begrudgingly post there.

threetonesun: Even when it was Twitter drinking from the firehose didn't really make your life better. I don't need a two sentence breaking update from a Miyazaki baby to stay on top of this stuff, and quite frankly if they can't bother to make a blog post or press release it's probably just noise any way.

ethanrutherford: claiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.

traderj0e: A few of these were actual calls to violence, but most were about political opinion https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne...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.

raverbashing: It would be ironic if Xorg launched a twitter competitor using a custom update protocol (an X extension) over the network and TCL

mghackerlady: knowing how xorg currently operates (it doesn't, it has a successor) it'd be a wayland protocol negotiated over dbus and mainly opposed by the GNOME people

UncleMeat: They also mention that tweets today get far less engagement than they once did.

r-w: * _their_ tweets

the_real_cher: I had that exact same thought. The argument they presented applies to any walled garden, they gave no reason why X would be the exception.It's clear this is about politics, and I'm not opposed to that, Elon is not awesome, but trying to justify it otherwise seems kind of shady.

ethanrutherford: It's pretty damn simple actually. Their target audience by and large doesn't use twitter anymore, either.

traderj0e: It's not even ideological concerns about the platform but about the userbase. TikTok and Instagram have a lot of left-wing people on them, as they've alluded to, regardless of who owns those. Twitter users are too right-wing for them.

jimmar: So just talk to the people who you think already agree with you?

alex1138: bsky is meant to hold the promise of control your algorithm, I don't see why that can't be the model going forward

supern0va: The problem is largely one of community. The folks talking about AI are still primarily on X and haven't moved over.

r-w: Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?

Brendinooo: My original comment did not claim that they were not ideological and it did not claim that that they do not do political activism, so a reply of "[o]f course they care about ideological concerns" makes no sense to me.

nosefurhairdo: Hunter Biden laptop and covid lab leak were systematically censored on twitter and elsewhere, and twitter was actively working with federal government to censor speech that was neither illegal or against any TOS.You should take a look at the twitter files. This has nothing to do with "violent hate speech."

bigyabai: > twitter was actively working with federal governmentThat's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.

PaulHoule: It is the way they express those views.I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.[1] if you want to know the criteria I use take a look at this book https://www.amazon.com/Watch-Right-Conservative-Intellectual...

archagon: Musk’s account is the most engaged and followed account on Twitter. De facto, Twitter is his global soapbox.

loeg: GP is complaining about a shift from one set of positions to a different set.

anonymousiam: GP (me) is not complaining about shifting positions. EFF was fairly neutral for the prior two decades, and even though I did not agree with everything they did, I thought they were worthy of support. Last year, they began filing some lawsuits without much research or diligence, and without much of a legal basis. I waited a while and watched, and I saw them becoming more and more partisan.I liked it when they were more about defending rights and less about attacking the "right."

lux-lux-lux: Just looking over recent posts, the EFF gets more interaction on BlueSky than it does on X despite 1/3 the followers and being on a much smaller site.I think that says it all.

CobrastanJorji: Plus, even if it did get less engagement, I imagine that BlueSky is full of the sorts of people who donate to EFF.

gred: He's saying that they have ideological concerns beyond the ideological concerns you would tend to associate with the EFF (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). I for one am sad to see that this is the case. There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.

beepbooptheory: [delayed]

latexr: > changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism.What exactly are “neutral rights”? Every right is political, and none of them are neutral, you’ll always find someone who supports them and someone who opposes them. Remember when Nestlé’s CEO said that calling water a human right was an “extreme” opinion? And there used to be a time when people claimed owning slaves was their right.What you are calling “questionable” right now is just something you don’t agree with. I have a feeling history will support EFF’s position over yours.

nicce: They would also leave TikTok and Instagram as well if it would be pure ideological reasoning.

bakugo: Sorry but no. I don't care what inflated numbers Meta brags about after redirecting random people from Instagram and counting that as an "active user", Threads is so utterly irrelevant that I literally forget it exists for months at a time because nobody talks about it.Even here on HN, searching for links to threads.com in comments from the past year yields a mere 53 results. For comparison, searching for xcancel.com, an unofficial frontend for x.com that allows logged out users to view replies, yields 795 results.

lux-lux-lux: Threads is extremely ‘normie-coded,’ I don’t think there’s much overlap with HN demographics.

ethanrutherford: the EFF didn't move from political neutral. The right just moved more right.

Brendinooo: I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".Is that correct?

notatoad: X/twitter is a media company. choosing which media products to purchase based on political values is how it has always worked.

xigoi: Choosing media producers based on their politics is how it always worked. Social networks are not producers of their content.

jeltz: The few people who were not terminally online left Twitter around the time it was renamed.

shevy-java: > an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years agoWell - 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.

rockskon: And not all influential people are Elon Musk or Catturd.

supern0va: >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.

takoid: But it's worth their time to stay on platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon? Something isn't adding up.

VHRanger: There's presumably engagement on those two.It's better to have a smaller core of highly engaged people than a mass of disengaged eyeballs glazing over.

mullingitover: It's grossly dishonest to conflate a complexion with an ethnicity. 'White' is a complexion, not a culture.

pirate787: Part of the replacement is declaring white Americans don't have a culture. Would you say the same about black Americans?

baggachipz: The linked blog post specifically states that they're leaving Twitter because they have been silenced by the platform and, as a result, no longer consider it a viable communication vehicle. That it's owned and operated by a nazi is icing on the shit cake.

pesacharia: The old owners of Twitter did the same thing just in the other direction. And tbh it’s pretty easy to avoid musk’s idiocy. I never get suggested stuff from himThe old Twitter was way more of an echo chamber than it is now

archagon: Absolutely not. Today's Twitter is an absurd MAGA echo chamber: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...Are you that user that replaces all your comments with periods once enough people flag you?

nitwit005: They know nothing changed. They want to pretend otherwise.

scrapy_coco: wtf bro

nailer: > Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes.X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.

mrguyorama: Community notes was built by Twitter, before the purchase.

smoovb: >The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com?I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.

etchalon: No one would say they used "David Duke's Whites Only Car Wash" but "didn't support the owner's politics."

habinero: It's always amazing how much that kind of person will pretend not to get it, and whine about being a pariah.

hsuduebc2: What exactly would happen according to you? The state in question got more Mexicans or South Americans which are also descendants of European colonists? Almost every American have European heritage. In my opinion this doesn't make much sense for Americans.What exactly means to be culturally white in US?

MetaWhirledPeas: > talk of a "white homeland"He's made enough controversial posts that you don't need to be making stuff up. His posts are about paranoia over whites being intentionally marginalized and persecuted, which is not the same as talking about a "white homeland".

qyph: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2030202550259962338

ActivePattern: He's most definitely talking about a white homeland [1][2][1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1962406618886492245 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remigration

suttontom: What is with the constant use of "folks" in "queer folks"? Is it offensive to call them "queer people" now?

traderj0e: I guess? Washington Post and others were doing this for a while. As insane as it was for a "neutral" news source to officially endorse political candidates, it was earning them subscribers. And Fox News didn't do this officially, but it was obvious.If you want to give EFF credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, and Twitter was just flaming.

archagon: How is it insane for a news source to endorse political candidates? This has been a routine function of newspapers for over a century.

traderj0e: It's insane for them to do it and also claim neutrality. They could just be honest and say they're the Democrat party newspaper. Yeah a lot of papers were guilty of this, and those were trash too.

an0malous: I closed my X account Tuesday evening after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Something just snapped finally and I realized there’s no value in monitoring the situation and all these accounts are just monetizing my energy and attention with no value provided.The only social media I’m going to keep for now is Reddit and YouTube because I think it’s still a net positive for the educational content, but even those are on the chopping block for me. The whole Internet is being capitalized into junk food, people just push out sensationalized low calorie garbage because they get paid per view. It’s sad to see.

latexr: Regarding YouTube, I can’t recommend enough turning off your history (even the front page is gone, it’s glorious) and subscribing only to select creators via RSS. I only see what I want to see, from creators I care about. Recommendations on the right side are always relevant to the video I just watched.

davidw: Here it is:https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/2030202550259962338That's just disgusting stuff. Gutter white nationalism.

archagon: Well, perhaps it's time to reconsider your perception of Bluesky and Mastodon.

jeltz: Not really, their target audience is much more likely to hang out on Mastodon and Bluesky. So even if the impressions might be fewer the quality of them is almost certainly higher.

stephen_g: I stoped using Twitter (around when it was changing to be X) because 60-70% of the accounts I cared about left the platform. More and more people will look elsewhere as more organisations and people who aren’t into Musk’s politics leave.

diath: Not really, this is the kind of argument you only ever see on Reddit/HN, normal people don't care.

loeg: All dozen bloosky users have been sure to chime in as well.

baggy_trough: It's a symptom of the deepening intolerance and censoriousness of leftists.

ThrowawayTestr: >What exactly are “neutral rights”?Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with them, like free speech. Something both the left and the right seem to hate.

latexr: > Rights that apply to people even if you disagree with themThat is true of every right. A right that doesn’t apply when you disagree isn’t a right.

protimewaster: There are many studies that point toward the opposite, so I strongly suspect you're wrong.

pron: First, as others have pointed out, it's always been like that up to a point. But that's not the problem with X.I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist and making a Nazi salute on live television are very different things). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), they mostly preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum.

shermantanktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambo%27sIt was real, and even as a kid I knew it was wrong.

kstrauser: For a long time I thought that was a fever dream from my childhood. Nope. I still can't quite believe that was real, but I personally remember it.

satvikpendem: How is it a poor take? Yes that's exactly what I said to do. It's the same as Reddit, I don't read whatever garbage is on r/all, I follow specific subreddits. Honestly people should curate no matter what social media they're on and find ways to stop seeing suggested content; my Instagram shows me only people I follow too, via a third party app/mod.

btown: This would be true if the algorithm changes were limited to for-you feeds. But the larger problem is that the set of people willing to pay for X are boosted in replies. So if that set of people, which tends towards a certain political bias, is hostile towards a poster, that poster will be driven away from posting on X.The net result is that X shows breaking news, in the same way that the (infamous) meme of bullet holes marked on the WWII plane only shows part of the story - the people who have departed the platform aren't posting, and thus X is only breaking news from a subset of people.This might be fine for certain types of topics. For understanding the zeitgeist on culture and politics, though, you can't filter your way towards hearing from voices that are no longer posting at all.

satvikpendem: I don't care about culture and politics on X, in fact it is something I actively block. By discussion I mean tech news and trends, ie how is someone using the latest AI model or what new project was created, that sort of stuff. The people I follow provide me that, not politics. If you're there for politics then I agree with your point, look elsewhere.

jeffbee: EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.

Terr_: [delayed]

latexr: > 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...

mattbillenstein: Pretty interesting to see the drop off in impressions - Twitter/X really is just a megaphone for Musk to deliver his "probably next year" wrt various product releases for the Elon-gelicals who bid up Tesla stock to meme levels.I really can't imagine the data is even good for training Grok anymore - like if it's such a small subset of neo-nazi supporting folks - how is it even useful?

davidw: In the past, most business owners would perhaps quietly donate to a party or candidates, but probably wouldn't hang their ideology out in front of people all day, every day. Think about someone like Warren Buffett. He has political views, but they are not something he's out there loudly airing on a huge platform.And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.

bluGill: There have always been business owners who shouted their ideology, and others who were quiet. You might remember some cases more than others, and some have had a louder voice than others, but both go way back.

xigoi: Astounds me that anyone was using the platform even before Musk took over it.