The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
Nate Silver, famously popular (...lol) with the online left, made a post about this recently: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
EFF is, politically, left wing.
EFF used to stand for a cause that was neither left nor right.
Perhaps they still do, particularly because that’s exactly what they stand for. The overall shift in perspective and narrative to the right makes them appear left.
If the narrative of a platform is intentionally divisive and making them appear left, leaving is the only way to both be center and present as center.
A warped perspective is hard to spot if you’ve been staring at it too long.
The only congressman who would actually support the EFF in digital rights is Massie, a republican.
Reading their post they throw out every progressive buzz word for the omnicause, they are clearly aligning themselves with the progressive wing of the Democrats. The wing which is ironically some of the most anti-free speech in all of American politics.
The current administration’s curtailments of free speech go far above and beyond anything progressives would ever propose to do.
What’s the point of lying this blatantly? You don’t believe it and neither does anyone else; who’s it for?
It's a completely defensible statement and I believe it fully.
> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
https://unherd.com/2026/04/how-censorship-seized-america/?ed...
(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking
(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:
(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
How is that a false statement?
Just as an example, the Trump admin pulled funding from research units that used the words "gender" or "climate change".
Yes, it was comically inept, but it was also legitimately harmful to free speech.
And how about ICE recording the faces of people who attend the no kings protests in order to antagonize them?
Trump being a censorship happy abuser of power in no way detracts from Obama and Biden being cut from the same cloth.
Obama or Biden did nothing even close
Nothing said here is of substance and instead mere projection of speculation.
If they came out openly as gay as an organization but kept their current stated goal of digital freedom, they still would be a digital rights organization I do not see what driveling about supposed progressive politics makes fighting for digital rights bad.
An organization aligning itself with progressives means they will only support a certain set of digital rights that align with progressive politics and not others.
I guess you can still call yourself a digital rights organization if you want by you won’t be seen as legitimate by both sides of the aisle.
Which digital rights are exempt if you are subscribing to the "progressive" side of politics?
And even if true how does that make it suddenly an organization one shouldn't support?
Is saving one of two arms better than saving none because you can't save the other?
This is a lie, certain powerful elements of the right wing are much more anti free speech.
Who?
Search for:
from:EFF "twitter files" on X. Zip, zilch, nada. Nothing about a large government censorship campaign that especially targeted conservatives.
Well if you look at board you see that more than one member served in the Obama admin or directly worked for it at some point.
https://www.eff.org/about/board
That's when I would donate to them, annually. I still have two t-shirts.
EFF still does.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
Massie, a republican, and Rand Paul, another republican, are by far the most supportive of free speech politicans in congress.
By what metric?
The freedom index is a good start.
https://freedomindex.us/us/
Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress
https://freedomindex.us/us/legislators/session/11/sort/sd/
Maybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group.
Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people.
Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
Whoa!
> We have assigned pluses to the yeas because Congress has every duty to forbid grossly illicit acts of sexual perversion in the armed forces.
It is full of things that are not what I would consider freedoms. Freedoms of companies to exploit oil reserves is one. Voting no to taxpayer funded healthcare is a good thing,apparently.
Edit: and I didnt look further than 3 clicks away. They are not hiding their political bias very well.
Looking very quickly at some of the votes being tracked, I don't see any vote that remotely qualifies as supporting or opposing free speech. Instead, they're focusing on things like "do you oppose the Federal Reserve making interest payments?" "do you oppose cryptocurrency regulations?" "do you oppose energy efficiency regulations for appliances?"
So no, it's not a good start.
You cannot be serious. Looking at the 'Freedom Index', I can see them approving of things like restricting abortion, giving the executive even more power and more.
And neither of them are MAGA. They fucking hate Trump. Republicans aren't all MAGA.
Blue Sky heavily censors its platform
Blue Sky has like 3 dozen employees or something nuts like that. They have no time to perform censoring at the scale other platforms do.
[citation needed]
No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SnAJOluk1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC64XJl2mXg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhTVHeQK10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRF80IWYX8
So people specifically get there to be as big of an ass as they can be and then get all pikachu.jpg when they get banned?
It's a private platform, not a public utility. They can choose their customers.
The point of these videos is that no platform that values freedom of expression and diverse points of view would have auto-ban systems for the kinds of things that he said. X is massively more liberal in what it allows and what it tolerates before it will ban someone than Blue Sky. So the EFF's claims are totally disingenuous and I don't think people should stand for it no matter where they stand politically.
Youtube videos are not reliable sources.
> ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable
This was a bipartisan agreement. Democrats just say "nothingburger" a lot when you talk about it.
The EFF is, and has always been, a libertarian org with a narrow focus.
That is incredible rewriting of history.
How? He's "investigating" CNN right now for...something? Something about them reporting on the Iran war
No, that is the obvious and clear truth. MAGA has done a pretty good job at making the opposite appear true, though.
True as stated, but if you generalize the statement to "enemy concepts", who decided that?
For example, where did the term "freeze peach" come from?
Right went full fascist. Being moderate fascist is not an apolitical position despite being in the middle.
I don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.
I worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare.
I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
I read parent as saying the intern worked for the Trump admin.
yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.
> Nate Silver, [...] made a post about this recently
Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.
What makes it not tethered to reality? Do you have a different chart?
It's quite tethered to reality.
> EFF is, politically, left wing.
EFF is more like classical liberal. They generally oppose regulation of speech/tech and oppressive laws like DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) but promote things in the nature of antitrust like right-to-repair. Everything is required to be crammed into a box now so that often gets called "left" because the tech companies (also called "left") have found it more effective to pay off the incumbents in GOP-controlled states when they don't like right-to-repair laws, although Hollywood ("left" again) are traditionally the ones pressuring Democrats to sustain the horrible anti-circumvention rule when they're in power.
It turns out trying to fit everything into one of two boxes is pretty unscientific.
> EFF is more like classical liberal.
I mean, they were, but that no longer appears to be the case.
Appears being the operative word.