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.

Which is fine but just be honest about it.

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.

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.

The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.

For example, they list a few of reasons that leaving social media isn't viable for everyone, including "Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information."

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.

Don't get me started on tiktok...

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.

I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.

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.

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.

  > 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.  

Edit: I knew this was coming:

> "But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?"

> Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.

Too late, I already made up my mind about this. You're Mozilla to me.

Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed

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.

Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.

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.

How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.

>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.

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".

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

Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...