Comment by spopejoy
5 hours ago
The story behind the numbers they present clearly demonstrates that X is censoring/shadowbanning them. Going from 600MM to 13MM impressions/yr -- losing 98% of their impressions! -- is no accident but clearly Musk's thumb on the scale.
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
Is censorship the only possible explanation for the drop in impressions? Presumably the vast majority of impressions before were from bots.
"From bots" =)
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
It sort of doesn't matter. Bottom line is it isn't an effective platform for them.
What does it take to characterize legit users also as bots
They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
Do we have to be politically neutral to the abhorrent?
Probably not, but then go ahead and say it.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
So if they're politically neutral, should they have an account on Truth Social too in your opinion?
Should they not? I can’t see why truth social users shouldn’t be a target for EFF’s message
Yes. Even though I agree with a lot of what the EFF does, this is a valid reason to be skeptical of intent.
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> I thought EFF would be his thing too, no?
Musk is a freedom of speech absolutist when it comes to the things he has to say. ‘I think that the bedrock of democracy is freedom of speech’ [1].
He has rather different views when it’s anyone else speaking [2].
[1] https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/tom-oloha...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
That may be the case, but the EFF’s Twitter alone is enough to explain their poor performance.
Their last post did quite well, and it is characteristically different from their other posts.
I don’t think Elon Musk personally needs to put his thumb on the scale in this case. I don’t even understand why he’d be involved here and not say anything. Like wouldn’t he say “EFF sucks” or something? I dunno, I don’t really keep up with that kind of thing.
It’s fine if the EFF wants to leave because they aren’t reaching people.
On a decent social platform, it shouldn't even matter if their posting sucks or is lazy. If I followed them, I want to see their stuff. If I'm not seeing the posts of the accounts I follow, the site is not worth me using - same if ppl who explicitly followed me aren't seeing my posts.
> I don’t think Elon Musk personally has to put his finger on any scale. I thought EFF would be his thing too, no?
Not sure why you would say that, I know he’s branded himself as a tech guy but beyond that nothing about the EFF seems to match his values.
The EFF tried to sue him last year too: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/judge-rejects-governments...
Maybe, I haven’t been keeping up since the cracker machine stuff. I thought EFF was a GNU-adjacent thing any generic tech person supported. I guess I was wrong.
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The thing is, unless their posts have only gotten bad recently, it's reasonable to assume that the drop in traffic is unrelated to post quality. Algorithms, changing audiences, etc. become better explanations.
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Leaving out key parts of a quote is a disingenuous way to attempt to make a counter-argument, especially when the full quote clearly contradicts your second sentence.
It's not necessarily shadowbanning (although it could well be), given that it's been turned into a cesspit where huge numbers of users left and the ones still there are probably not the demographic that would engage with the EFF, it could just be a natural consequence of Musk's wrecking it.
Same result, either way.