Comment by Brendinooo
8 hours ago
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.
It reminds me a bit of the ACLU. If nothing else, they were always respectable in their vociferous defense of the 1st amendment and free speech. But they got caught up in other ideological battles, and transitioned to a more partisan organization... defending speech they politically agreed with, not worrying about others. Generally, becoming more small-minded.
The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.
If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.
I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.
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.
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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.
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Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
just not twitter censorship
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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.
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More than the cost of not posting on X.
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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"?
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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.
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Which viewpoints?
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...
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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...
> 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.
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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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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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"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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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.
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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.
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.
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"?
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?
Encouraging people to use X drives money into the hands of fascists.
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.
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.
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Where you do you see this insinuation being made? I don't see anything like that.
They also mention that tweets today get far less engagement than they once did.
* _their_ tweets
Should they care that tweets from NazisRule88 are doing better?
Right. Those are the only tweets that are relevant here.
Check out the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, they support anonymity, privacy and free expression:
https://www.fire.org/
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.
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Another victim of the long march through the institutions.
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.
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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.
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I don’t even see them using that phrase in the linked thread? What’s wrong with it anyway?
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How is the EFF charter incompatible with saying "Queer folks"?
What are you even saying with this criticism? Do you think queer folks were never going to come up in "Digital rights"?
Remind me again what the Q in LGBTQ stands for?
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.
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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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