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EFF is leaving X

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Re: EFF is leaving X

#611

Post by carefree-bob »

lambdas wrote: post #86
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #47

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 1,50…

I don’t feel their stance is “I’m not getting enough attention and it’s all Musk’s fault and I’m leaving”. More “X is simply not worth our time anymore”. I can’t say with any certainty that X is on a death spiral (personally it does feel that way), but the kind of crowd who have remained in spite of Musk’s many public embarrassments (and the handling of Grok deep fakes and women) probably aren’t the kind who are pass…

If that was really true, they wouldn't make a big post about why they are leaving, they would just turn off the lights and go elsewhere.

The problem for the EFF is that they don't have anywhere else to go with nearly the reach of Twitter. Bluesky has only 15 million monthly active users. They could pin their hopes on Facebook, but it's hard to think of a criticism of Twitter that wouldn't apply to Facebook.

Basically the problem for EFF and a lot of the progressive activist orgs out there is that they want a mass global audience but a platform with progressive activist moderation, and that was possible in the heyday of the Biden Administration, but starting with Musk's purchase of Twitter and firing of much of the progressive activist staff, together with the loss in the Missouri vs Biden consent decree, it's getting harder to find a truly mass audience social media platform that is willing to enforce progressive activist social norms.

As this realization sinks in, we are seeing organization after organization rage quit the mass market platforms and join more niche platforms that is moderated to their niche taste (e.g. mastodon, bluesky, etc), and this is just one example of that. The EFF of old would never have seen this as a problem, but for the present day EFF it's a big problem.

Another option is a medium without engagement at all. You post your stuff and that's it, for example you can quote/amplify but not comment. No zingers, mocking quote tweets, no clapbacks, etc. I think an organization like the EFF could tolerate that, they want a pure write-only medium where you make a PR announcement that gets lot of attention but is not subject to any disparagement.

Big orgs would love a system like that, but I'm not convinced it could draw a lot of eyeballs.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#613

Post by darknavi »

lucb1e wrote: post #535
lxgr wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It used to be a bannable offense to even link to your presence on a competing site Huh? This sounds like you mean before elon "free speech!" musk but I can only imagine that, if it ever was a thing, it was a thing after. At some point a competitor's links were being blocked, a little 'oops'ie with 'the algorithm' of course. Facebook also pulled some of those over the years. I don't know about outright bans though,…

I can't tell if you're being satirical or if this is some 1984 re-writing of history, but Twitter definitely banned linking to other social media websites under Elon's rule.

> "We know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms; however, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter," the company said in a statement.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/twitter-bans-linking-to...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/twitter-ban-soci...

Re: EFF is leaving X

#614

Post by culi »

throwthro0954 wrote: post #606
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…

>throwing those salutes It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment, you are making it sound like he is going around doing it all the time. He's a bit of an eccentric, I genuinely believe he wasn't intending on it coming off like that. > "white homeland" Where is this quote available?

> It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment

He was quite self aware of what he did. He immediately followed it up by visiting a rally for the far right in Germany.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#615

Post by vict7 »

deadeye wrote: post #589
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…

[flagged]

Key thing being pictures, not videos. Far easier to make the same false equivalence you are making that way.

Sad to see folks continuing to twist themselves into knots to defend an indefensible gesture performed by an objectively terrible human being.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#616

Post by DaSHacka »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #602
deadeye wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Say you're Elon Musk, billionaire and really smart guy. And you're asked to give a speech. That speech will be viewed by millions. You probably have a speechwriter, and a PR consultant, and hey, why not a body language consultant. When you get on stage, you're going to present exactly the message you mean to. Anything less would be a waste of your time, right?

"Really smart" and "elon" are not two words I'd put together in the same sentence.

Reminder this is the same man that paid someone else to play on his video game account for him so he could pretend to be better at video games.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#617

Post by dzhiurgis »

dmschulman wrote: post #581
dzhiurgis wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the biggest accounts on X hosts one of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify/Apple and has a huge following that's grown exponentially since 2023. He's an active Holocaust denier, proud antisemite, and dined with the president and members of his cabinet on more than one occasion. To say there's no growing movement towards Nazi and anti-Jewish ideologies is to be willfully ignorant of the world around you.

Random christian troll doesn’t make entire platform a nazi bar.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#618

Post by madeofpalk »

commandlinefan wrote: post #595
madeofpalk wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.

So because EFF does not post their news in my small Australian home town newspaper they're not free-speech absolutists?

Re: EFF is leaving X

#619

Post by carefree-bob »

dmschulman wrote: post #581
dzhiurgis wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the biggest accounts on X hosts one of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify/Apple and has a huge following that's grown exponentially since 2023. He's an active Holocaust denier, proud antisemite, and dined with the president and members of his cabinet on more than one occasion. To say there's no growing movement towards Nazi and anti-Jewish ideologies is to be willfully ignorant of the world around you.

Twitter has over a billion users. You can find big accounts saying all sorts of inflammatory things.

What you are complaining about is that tweets which rile you up are not censored. But those days are basically over, so you may want to consider leaving twitter if you insist on a higher level of censorship than what twitter is giving you.

Of course if you already left twitter, and are still complaining merely about the existence of a business that doesn't censor to your taste, then I would recommend looking for other past times. Try baseball.

Re: EFF is leaving X

#620

Post by ks2048 »

codeflo wrote: post #116

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).

X11? What is that, one of Musk's children?
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