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.
The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization.
Of course they care about ideological concerns.
Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.
My sibling in sin, I have an EFF tee from about 2001-2002 that reads, in boldface, “FREE SPEECH HAS A POSSE”. They have always been broadly political.
This does not address the substance of the comment you are replying to. In fact, that comment was itself replying to a comment making the same argument you are making, explicitly explaining why it is non-sequitur.
Sad to hear. Can you help me understand its shrinkage and loss of relevancy?
What makes you think they are shrinking and losing relevance, other than feels?
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Where in my comment did I claim otherwise?
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 difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
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?
It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).
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).
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?
Not exactly.
Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.
And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.
I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.
You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.
> Not exactly.
But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.
So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
> if you disagree with me on the other stuff
This part is too broad.
Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.
For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.
But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."
> So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.
By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly
Funny, how those in a hierarchical system political system struggle so much to understand, hierarchy.
It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.
Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...
I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.
I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.
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.
There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.
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Whatever you're trying to imply here, it's a personal attack that does not contribute to the discourse.
The OP is coyling spraying half baked questions across discussion in an effort to do who knows what. It is an attack on the delivery, not the person.
Just noting that I saw this, but I don't really see a point in replying outside of this comment at this time because I don't feel the need to prove myself to you, and I don't know how I could change what I'm writing to satisfy you personally anyways.
Have a nice evening!
No, nothing of the sort is happening. There is no reason to assume bad faith in those questions. The questions are not "half-baked".
I make such dismissals because if I merely expressed doubt, it appears that you would make the same accusations against me.
The burden of proof is on you; what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence; etc.
> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.
I think that is why, yes.
I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.
This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.
Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?
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.
You said the "statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns..." like you were uncovering some hidden truth or gotcha in between the lines here. Was that not what you intended to write?
And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?
IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"
just not twitter censorship
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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.
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.
> they have been silenced by the platform
Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.
Bluesky might have be niche in terms of users but it's an open platform like activity pub so it's at least quite aligned with the EFF mission.
This is an important point and it feels odd that the entire discussion seems to not be able to engage with it, but on another level it might be the same problem. As a long term financial support of the eff I'm starting to get the same awkward feelings that made me question my financial support for Mozilla and Wikipedia. Any time someone views the world through a single lens, it highlights some things and ignores others and it seems like a net loss to the world that everything is being forced into a being judged along a single (increasingly polarised) axis
That's what the comment is stating, but I disagree with the statement. This is perfectly in-line with the EFF's mission.
Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.
A free and open society is a prerequisite for the rights EFF fight for. We cannot enjoy the freedoms of digital privacy in a an authoritarian regime. The rights to fight for EFFs concerns are currently being threated by the fascist turn of the USA. Thus, the EFF and other likeminded organizations are very much justified in leaving X.
> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.
I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.
Disagree with so much here. But if, in your mind, the US is turning authoritarian, this is a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. They should be taking the fight where it most needs fighting. They should not be making donors like myself question whether we still share objectives.
You are completely correct in your analysis. Reading some of the responses here - people who think the EFF should only fight for some rights for some people and only on corporate platforms instead of across society at large - would be shocking if I hadn’t already seen how willing rich tech bros are to overlook everyone and everything else for their own personal gain.
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.
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?
It lends legitimacy to a declining site controlled by a white supremacist and filled with more neo-nazi’s by the day.
The fewer legitimate organizations posting on twitter, drawing eyes and views to the site, the better.
Its a bit silly to say that they are declining. For its specific niche (mass short form/viral content) there simply aren't any relevant competitors that even come close.
More than the cost of not posting on X.
That cost should be $0, so that's not the issue.
What is the cost of posting to X in addition to Tiktok, Bluesky, and Facebook? If it's not effectively $0, it should be.
This is completely performative, and I personally don't think it's the best move.
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
That's explicitly not the logic EFF is using; they come close to outright rejecting it.
> ... when the amount of impressions are no longer worth doing it for
> The Numbers Aren't Working Out
I don't know. That's front and center. Can to share how that's an "outright rejection"?
They explicitly say they're staying on other platforms whose ideologies they don't agree with.
Because there's enough people there to be worth it
It's like how the Soviets and the Americans were allies in world war II, the pros outweighed the cons
Was it costing a lot of money or resources to say on X? If they got few impressions what does it matter? You can write the content once.
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.
You are being, and have been, played. What is happening to the left now is exactly what you thought was happening to the right before Elon.
"Thought was happening" is an interesting way to put it when they most certainly were being censored, and we know that we're even colluding with the FBI to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Not to say that they're not doing the inverse now, but to paint it as some misconception that the inverse was happening before is just disingenuous.
Which viewpoints?
He ran DOGE and illegally destroyed science and arts funding across the US government. [0] He continues to interfere in elections, committing what is likely fraud. He silences viewpoints that disagree with him on twitter and routinely interferes with grok’s training to promote his own viewpoints.
Oh and he begged to visit Epstein’s child sex slavery island. [2]
I get that your moral compass might not be fully functional, but I draw the line at fascism, treason, and pedophilia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...
[1] https://www.thebulwark.com/p/yes-elon-musk-vote-buying-is-ag...
[2] https://people.com/emails-reveal-that-elon-musk-asked-jeffre...
Bro. He's still censoring viewpoints. He's also boosting his ideological viewpoints, which diminishes the reach of everything else.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-elon-musk-uses-his...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
Which is the issue? That’s he’s censoring, or that he’s sharing his own viewpoints? Your argument that the latter causes the former is not convincing, as there are plenty of opposing views on Twitter that get exposure.
The fact that my post got flagged (edit: now unflagged) is maybe indicative that the differing viewpoint is the concern.
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That plus journalists have a strong bone to pick with X because they aren't given preferential treatment over the rest of the userbase with VIP blue checkmarks like they used to.
Back in the day if you saw a blue checkmark they were either celebrities, politicians, or journalists. And they were always featured heavily in the old Twitter trending algorithm. The checkmark also made their Tweets standout among the plebs.
> freedom is intersectional
What is your working definition of freedom? I'm interested in replying but I'd like to engage with you on your terms.
"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.
>"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
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What? Freedom of association implicitly means freedom not to associate. It is not at all incompatible with freedom to say, "I don't want to hang out with those guys because they suck."
I believe in freedom of speech for people that I don't want to talk to. There is no contradiction in that.
that's fair, but nobody here was arguing you can't leave. the point is that the original post framed leaving as some grand moral act of defending intersectional freedom when it's just choosing not to hang out somewhere. you're allowed to do that. just don't dress it up as activism.
Universality of human rights is a great principle that breaks down horribly the moment it makes contact with people who do not want you to have those rights. Like, even if you're a single-issue free speech maximalist, it is entirely self-defeating to argue that censorious tyrants should be afforded the benefits of free speech. The only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to amass power to destroy free speech.
And yes, to be clear, Elon Musk is a censorious tyrant. All the big tech leaders are, both because some of them started out as outright fascists and because the rules of the tech CEO game are, in the Nash equilibrium, unfavorable to liberal ideals.
Dehumanization is another common tactic of tyrants. You look at the group of dissidents you want to censor, identify those who are weak enough to silence, and use your control over society and government to make them pay for not being on their side. Rinse and repeat until you've salami-sliced away every dissident's rights. The only effective means of stopping dehumanization is to render it ineffective by making lots of friends who understand and defend against these attacks. [0] The interminably dense social justice literature uses jargon terms like "solidarity" and "intersectionality", which seem almost calculated to piss off the unenlightened into reflexively opposing social justice because we might as well be wizards chanting Latin curses at people to sound smart. But the idea is simple.
So yes, freedom is intersectional - because it it ultimately comes from the people as a whole exercising their power to check the power of tyrants.
[0] "Apes together strong", in case HN doesn't render emoji correctly.
"the only purpose tyrants have of free speech is to use it to destroy free speech" says who? you? so you get to read minds now, know exactly why someone wants to speak, and preemptively decide they don't deserve to? that's just you picking winners not defending free speech
and you didn't call every tech CEO a fascist but you did call them all censorious tyrants who operate against liberal ideals. which is a fun thing to say on a website where you're freely saying it. if the tyrants are this bad at tyranny maybe they're not actually tyrants.
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> You don’t have a freedom to make anyone else agree with or believe in your views…
No one has asserted this.
If your views suck, people have the freedom to say "ok, bye".
(Musk asserts otherwise, of course. https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...)
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> the point is don't pretend leaving is a moral stance when it's just a preference
So I'm not free to assert moral reasons for my actions?
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.
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That works until that person is influential enough to sway political and social conditions drastically
so the argument is that someone is so influential their tweets are basically mind control, but also you need to leave the platform to stop them? if musk is that powerful, your absence from x isn't doing anything. and if he's not that powerful, then you're just mad about a guy you disagree with having a big megaphone.
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Would you mind spelling it out for people like me, generally aware of the EFF but haven’t been following it too closely?
What ideological concerns are they focused on? Imo wanting digital privacy has always been ideological, and to the extent it has ever been part of a culture war they seem to have lost that war.
Yes to be honest the "But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" part is not really convincing. It's like they dislike Musk but miss the boat to quit for just this reason.
On the other hand I don't think have ever seen their posts on X, I mostly hear about them via their mailing list.
Where did you read that in their post?
Because what I read is that their X posts are getting only 3% of the engagement compared to pre-Musk Twitter.
The post insinuates that's because the platform intentionally down-ranks posts for ideological purposes.
> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day.
Clearly EFF is now more interested in virtue signaling than the privacy mission.
Where you do you see this insinuation being made? I don't see anything like that.
They would also leave TikTok and Instagram as well if it would be pure ideological reasoning.
Did the CEO of TikTok and Instagram also do a Nazi salute on stage?
Not that I know of. But if you look at how TikTok and Meta impacted our society, you could argue they did worse.
What do you mean by "also"?
I didn't see that in the post. The thesis is pretty clear and aligned with EFF as a non-profit that has to allocate resources strategically:
> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.
and
> Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement. We've spent years exposing how these platforms suppress marginalized voices, enable invasive behavioral advertising, and flag posts about abortion as dangerous. We’ve also taken action in court, in legislatures, and through direct engagement with their staff to push them to change poor policies and practices.
It's pretty clear that all these platforms have various problems within EFF's purview, but the difference with X is that they're not getting value from using it.
The rise of fascism is EXACTLY what I think the EFF should be concerned about. Don’t you see the connections? Digital privacy, government market manipulation, free speech, these are all core concerns of the EFF and they are all of even greater importance under fascism.
And how does picking and choosing which social media platforms they blast content onto fight fascism? Are Tiktok and Facebook leadership known for their antifascist stances?
They also mention that tweets today get far less engagement than they once did.
* _their_ tweets
Right. Those are the only tweets that are relevant here.
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.
This is the exact opposite of reaching out to a broader audience.
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.
So just talk to the people who you think already agree with you?
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 more credit, maybe they figured at least they can reach people on TikTok who don't already agree but don't already disagree, while Twitter was just flaming.
How is it insane for a news source to endorse political candidates? This has been a routine function of newspapers for over a century.
It's insane for them to do it and also claim neutrality. They could just be honest and say they're a Democrat party newspaper. Yeah a lot of papers were guilty of this, and those were trash too.
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You need to relxa
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Another victim of the long march through the institutions.
Check out the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, they support anonymity, privacy and free expression:
https://www.fire.org/
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It's sad that they have gone political whereas their goal should, in my optics, be almost technocratically in favour of their own stated goals of "protecting user privacy from government/corporate surveillance, defending free speech online, enforcing net neutrality, promoting encryption, and combating abusive intellectual property laws".
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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
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.
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.
> I personally know no one who uses Threads
Real ‘I don’t know anyone who voted for Nixon’ energy here.
That's why I didn't start off with that statement lest I be accused of anecdata which is fair. But it's true in my case. How many do you know that use Threads, especially on a regular basis?
> I personally know no one who uses Threads.
I don’t know literally anyone using twitter and yet obviously people do.
Perhaps what the individuals we know are doing are in fact reflective of not very much.
I still see links to X quite often. I don’t think I have ever seen a link to Threads.
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.
Threads is extremely ‘normie-coded,’ I don’t think there’s much overlap with HN demographics.
Twitter seems to be more popular in reddit too
https://old.reddit.com/domain/threads.com/top/
https://old.reddit.com/domain/x.com/top/
There's not much overlap with any demographics.
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.
I don’t even see them using that phrase in the linked thread? What’s wrong with it anyway?
I don't see it either, funny how people had a knee jerk reaction without even visiting the thread and validating that the phrase even exists. Maybe it's even further down but without logging in I can't see it.
That quote is in the linked EFF statement, which you clearly didn't read.
True, I was looking at the linked thread as mentioned not the article.
Remind me again what the Q in LGBTQ stands for?