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.
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.
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
Twitter never cared about users rights. Read Matt Taibbi's congresional testimony on Twitter's censorship machine.
If you’re citing Matt Taibbi as a trustworthy source, man, I don’t know. He’s up there with Bari Weiss for “they’re either intentionally bad faith, stupid, or both” levels of nuance.
These are not serious people.
I not only read what he wrote, I read the screenshots of OG twitter. And what he said mirrored what they said. They were incredibly one sided an censorious as hell. Your post is basically just an ad hominem. A fallacy.
It was very interesting because it came to light the administration in power at the time, trump, leaned heavily on Twitter to promote what they wanted and hide they wanted hid. Meanwhile Biden's campaign requested revenge porn be removed and Matt and friends got extremely upset about that and called it government overreach (Biden wasn't in office at the time, of course).
Very funny when you think about it, but sad too
Read, was bs, as expected from matt
> 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.
Being a free speech absolutionist DOES NOT mean plastering your speech everywhere, including Twitter. Those are clearly two different concepts.
Also, literally nothing about this says anything about other people's speech. Them deciding not to use twitter doesn't mean you can't, obviously.
I feel like everyone is losing the plot a bit. Are we understanding the words we're saying before we choose to say them?
So because EFF does not post their news in my small Australian home town newspaper they're not free-speech absolutists?
what are you even talking about? they arent suppressing free speech, they are leaving a platform. this might be the most bot-like response ive ever seen, if youre not a bot then go outside, read a book, just log off my goodness.
Please explain. How does this suggest they no longer value free speech?
That’s not what the comment you replied to said.
They said the EFF’s ideology use to be free speech absolutism.
From the EFF post linked to that we are discussing here:
Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.
<snip>
neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like:
<snip>
Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information.
You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community.
That very much makes it sound like the EFF values free speech, but only if that speech is speech they agree with.
What about if your anti-abortion find uses X to spread crucial information. What about if you’re isolated and rely on X to connect with your community?
What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer?
The EFF used to be free speech absolutists, it’s evident they be taken over by progressive liberals who favour free speech they agree with.
Look in to the history of cases they have litigated. There’s definitely at least some where I disagreed with the content of the speech, but agreed with the right to say it and that the EFF were correct in supporting the case.
[flagged]
You can tell conservative opinions are censored and suppressed by the way they're constantly shoved down our throats every hour of every day.
There's a certain irony in the fact that whoever you're responsing to got their message removed.
It's not that conservative opinions are censored. It's that bad opinion with zero merit to any reasonable person, such as insults, racism, sexual harassment, etc, are censored.
Unfortunately that means that most conservative opinions are censored.
Or, at least, the ones that matter said by our most popular politicians.
Rephrased, think of it this way: if I talk like Barack Obama at work, I'm fine. If I talk like President Donald Trump, I'm getting sent to HR on my first day. And that has nothing to do with their political leanings.
Flagged, not removed. Subtle difference, not saying it's huge, but you can still see their comments if you enable showdead in your settings.
Censored by a different name is still censored.
Since the person you responded to got flagged/dead, I want to make sure they and everyone else who might think like them listens to this (an hour long, so yay attention span)
https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a
"As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor."
One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.
[flagged]
On X? Citation needed. Elsewhere too.
Yeah they're not anymore. Woke opinions were getting shoved until that abruptly stopped a bit before Trump's second term. Which is weird because this didn't happen in his first term. Now we've got Amazon promoting the Melania movie.
On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.
[flagged]
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.
Yeah, the followup to that "censorship of conservative opinions" complaint is always "which opinions are those"
It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"
[flagged]
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."
> twitter was actively working with federal government
That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
"working with federal government to censor speech" is a 1A violation on the government's side
Privately owned platforms are not required to respect the First Amendment. Neither Twitter nor X can guarantee your freedoms.
Of course not. Those platforms have 1A rights. In some cases, the US govt violated those rights by pressuring them to take down viewpoints, hence what I said about "1A violation on the government's side."
In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...
What did I say about the laptop? The WH coercion was about covid19.
My bad, I posted below the wrong parent, now I can't delete it.
ah np, HN probably disallows it cause I replied already
The government compelling them is the issue.
"were usually violent hate speech"
Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"???
It was often 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.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Which of those did Twitter suppress?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensions_on_X search for "gender", at least one was a Congressman
You're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about personally being let down by Mike Pence.
It IS if you want to FORCE others to believe them / abide by your rules and work to pass laws, even retroactively, to limit what can legally be said / done that used to be legal.
None of these were ever suppressed or censored.
Yes they were: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707893
claiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.
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.
Damn that Biden administration for getting the NY Post in trouble for posting crap while Trump was in office
They … did, though?
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
What censorship?
Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
Well we can tell where you stand when you describe their views as "talking points". Which isn't surprising on HN (reddit but more wordy).
[flagged]
This Hunter Biden shit is a good example. It was all over the place all the time. I don't even live in the US and kept stumbling on people talking about it in social media.
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 for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
care to share some quotes from those "conservative opinions" that were censored?
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-y...
How are those "conservative opinions"? Are you saying the whole thing was right-wing fan-fiction?
Which ones?
Yeah, I remember when the "Twitter Files" were being released and it turned out that Twitter was illegitimately censoring leaked nudes of Hunter Biden. Whyever would non-consensually posted nudes be taken down other than the suppression of conservatism?
They were also censoring Biden's ties to Ukraine. If you'd actually read any coverage on it that wasn't left wing, you would have known that instead of spinning up this strawman version of what happened.
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
> [group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy"
Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
I don't deny those opinions exist, but they aren't the ones being propped up by elon
[flagged]
What is the agenda? You're hinting at some conspiracy but I have no idea what it could even be
[flagged]
> lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."
What does that make clear?? Stop hinting and just say what you mean...?
It's not some big secret. You're trying to invent a conspiracy when there is none.
There's one particular website that they don't like, and they see declining engagement from, so they leave. There's other websites that might have less engagement, but they do like it, so they stay there. Then there's other websites that might have similar ideological disdain for, but they get very broad reach from, so they reluctantly stay.
I really don't see what the big deal is with trying to reach a broad audience.
Yes, EFF is a civil liberties group and always has been, which makes it a purely ideological movement.
Let's be honest and look at the engagement numbers of the post announcing this:
X post: 124 comments, 79 reblogs, and 337 likes
BlueSky post: 245 comments, 1400 reblogs, and 6.2K likes
Mastodon post: 403 reposts, 458 likes
These numbers, combined with the facts that Mastodon and BlueSky are aligned with internet freedoms while X is strongly aligned against internet freedoms, make for a clear-and-cut case that it's past time to leave the platform.
Which internet freedoms is X strongly aligned against?
Just one example, but having to be logged in to view most content on there was a recent change that made it pretty hostile to the openness of the web platform.
You can find links to other criticisms of twitter in TFA:
Interop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera...
Privacy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/twitter-removes-privac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/twitter-and-others-dou...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/twitter-uninentionally...
Accountability: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/twitter-axes-accountab...
DM encryption: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/after-weeks-hack-it-pa...
All of them, I think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_freedom
Banned third party clients and interoperability. Use their software to access your data on their servers, on their terms, or get shut down. Hard to think of anything more anti-internet freedom. I left when they did that, years ago.
They would not be able to enforce it on desktop computers, short of banning every user one-at-a-time, but they can easily blanket-ban it on mobile phones by requesting Apple and Google remove unauthorized third-party clients from their app stores. (Which they will do. Apple even lists unauthorized clients for services controlled by other parties as against the rules. Whatever that means.)
Well if you look at their bullet points:
- Greater user control how is any of the other platforms they have no problem with any different than twitter?
- Real security improvements where is end to end encryption on all the other social media? And why do they need end to end encryption to broadcast a message to the public?
- Transparent content moderation wait, the EFF is now calling for more censorship?
The first two points are clearly nonsensical, only the third one has at least some logic. Though if the EFF has turned pro-censorship, I am having bad feeling for having given them money in the past.
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!)
Link suppression is contested. Nikita says they're not deboosted. This guy tested it, found evidence they're no longer deboosted: https://x.com/phl43/status/2041893735827460446?s=20
Nikita says they were "never" deboosted, but Musk said they were going to do that and it was a huge topic...?
https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2041911302541730237?s=20
He says here about an interface change. I've noticed this change. The sites are opening in a kind of sub window with the feedback UI still visible. I found this annoying but now I see the point.
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.
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.
According to what metric? Your obvious hatred of Musk? Just like 90% of everyone else on here and reddit?
And not all influential people are Elon Musk or Catturd.
I don't like it and I haven't used it since before the whole nazi salute thing. I feel gross just accidentally following links to that place. Why would I support it or the people who use it?
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.
What does it say? EFF has not bothered to engage with basically anyone that replies to them on X the platform at least since Dec 1, 2025. Searching for EFF replies from older posts also shows that they basically never engage with X users, apart from using it as an advertising firehose.
If they spent any appreciable amount of time replying to people and not just themselves, their X impressions would be considerably larger. X themselves has been clear that engagement weights impressions/recommendations/algorithmic display, and EFF has done none of that.
It looks to me like a people at EFF problem, not an X problem.
They don’t do that kind of stuff on BlueSky either and do better there, and BlueSky doesn’t have the audacity to demand a paid subscription.
Also, I don’t think the kind of engagement X’s algorithms reward would be good for the EFF’s image as a serious organization.
Plus, even if it did get less engagement, I imagine that BlueSky is full of the sorts of people who donate to EFF.
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
Their front page says "The leading nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation for 35 years and counting!"
They are an organization that exists to support an ideological viewpoint. Any political stance is ideological!
>then say they will still be on BlueSky and Mastodon then you know it's purely 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.
"Open source network that isn't controlled by corporations" is ideological, but not quite in the same way that you seem to be framing this.
can you clarify what the ideology is and how they are not being honest about it
We are talking about EFF. They are essentially an advocacy group, 100% ideological by definition.
It would be dishonest of them to pretend they were not ideological. Staying on Twitter was likely worse for their mission then leaving it.
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.
Citing low engagement numbers as a reason for leaving while continuing to maintain an active Threads account is the opposite of honest.
Where's the dishonesty? Low engagement matters when you have to pay for it. It doesn't cost them anything to maintain an active Threads account.