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EFF is leaving X

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Re: EFF is leaving X

#521

Post by solid_fuel »

gred wrote: post #293
Legend2440 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

What are you talking about? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.

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.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#522

Post by anigbrowl »

pmdr wrote: post #234

> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.

Not if you're shadowbanned

Re: EFF is leaving X

#524

Post by cbmuser »

paulbjensen wrote: post #333

There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?

I find it hard to believe that WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram have almost the exact same number of users. This seems to be skewed data.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#525

Post by jjk166 »

conradfr wrote: post #372
nostrademons wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what is the cost of posting on X? Why do they even have a blue tick?

More than the cost of not posting on X.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#526

Post by LordDragonfang »

imiric wrote: post #490
davidw wrote: post #118

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 h…

This is a controversial opinion, but I do think that there are objectively right and wrong sides of political ideologies. At its core, there's nothing wrong with conservatism. Wanting to preserve traditional cultural and social values; the nuclear family with a father and mother figure; theology as the moral backbone—all of these are reasonable ideas. But somewhere along the way this got associated with xenophobia, r…

One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:

> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.

Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)

Re: EFF is leaving X

#527

Post by rustyhancock »

dyauspitr wrote: post #462
lasky wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Ultimately this approach is what's lead us to a progressively rising right wing.

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.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#528

Post by lucb1e »

mellosouls wrote: post #19

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.

Yeah, I'm confused. Why say one thing when you mean another?

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

Re: EFF is leaving X

#529

Post by contagiousflow »

schoen wrote: post #340

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019. When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-w…

> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.

I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?

Re: EFF is leaving X

#530

Post by an0malous »

latexr wrote: post #410
an0malous wrote: post #52

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 a…

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

Oh thanks, I didn't know you could do that. I do like the front page recommendations sometimes but maybe I'll try this
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