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My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology.

They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments.

I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.

>The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.

Have the costs to post to X grown too high? The salary of someone with the technical know-how to work the social media platform is too expensive? How does the math compare with Mastodon? Do you know about buffer.com?

I started giving to EFF about 10 years ago. It's pretty much the first and only organization I have regularly given to. It always felt like a non-political organization focused squarely on the right to access. Especially with its support of the Tor project. But this news has me confused and other commenters seem to be seeing virtue signaling or politically motivation.

Nothing recent made me feel quite as old and out of the loop more as the slowness with which I realized that this is about x.com (Twitter), not x.org (the windowing system).

> We'll Keep Fighting. Just Not on X

Yeah, somewhere where regular people that aren't terminally online won't ever have the chance to see it. This is a dumb decision. I'd very much like for open, distributed social networks to win, but that's not a reality we'll be living in anytime soon. X, for better or worse, gets you eyes, more so than any other alternative social media.

>Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement [...] We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.

Does this not apply to X users?

Astounds me that anyone is still using that platform after seeing how Musk treated the engineers when he took over.

Their logic for why they're on TikTok and Facebook seems sound to me, but doesn't that same logic apply to X? I kept waiting for the explanation but it never came...

I just wanna remind people that this website is full of elon's drones and bots who mob flagged any criticism of DOGE for months on end. A lot of the "outrage" expressed in this discussion is likely faux.

If we would talk about my local pizza restaurant here: Very nice move.

For EFF: That's ~15 years too late, and way too specific. Their job (without them ever having realized in fact) was to generate some force against these centralized commercial walled gardens, where we have our public discourse, with some opaque algorithms deciding what goes up and what goes down.

Is there any site that keeps track of companies/orgs and/or noteworthy people who have left "X"? I've noticed some pretty significant orgs leaving in the recent year or two and have repeatedly wondered if there's some kind of list out there. I mean, it would just be a handy list to show people when I say something like "more and more people are leaving that garbage site" and they want receipts and I'm like... "uh the province of New Brunswick was the latest I saw" >_> I found this list of celebrities in the meantime, at least: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/twitter-celebr...

Are they leaving because of low views? This means they are more concerned about views than anything else? I thought any sane company wants as much exposure anywhere no matter the political stance or other views.

Interesting that they are leaving the most uncensored social media site, but saying on the most tightly censored sites. Makes me wonder what their vision for the internet really is.

I follow lots of accounts that have low views, thanks for considering me not worth a simple cut and paste once in a while.

I honestly enjoyed the article and agree with their move but I did have a chuckle reading all the way through and then see g right there under the article the X social media sharing icon.

I’m sure it’s on its way out, but I did quietly laugh to myself from the irony.

I was recently asked about our (Oxide's) disposition to Twitter on the Peterman Pod[0], and the rationale for why we're no longer active there is pretty simple: the platform has become a cesspool of hate -- and it's antithetical to promoting a business (or any message, really). Aside from the morality of it (which is significant!), the hate itself is repugnant; it's not something that normal people want to be a part of in the long term.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhSL-5GtmQM#t=1h9m57s

So they are chasing engagement, and X isn't giving them the attention they think they deserve.

The golden days of the sentinels driving traffic without you paying for it are over, and they won't come back.

I tend to almost only use X now. I really can't use Facebook or Instagram since the introduction of "ad breaks" because I haven't given them ability to give me "personalised ads".

Don't get me started on tiktok...

Any chance they keep an RSS?

I worked at EFF from 2001 to 2019.

When I started, EFF was a very effective coalition between (primarily) progressives and libertarians. This had largely been the case since EFF was founded in 1990 by both progressives and libertarians. When people would call EFF a "left-wing" organization, I would correct them. It wasn't a left-wing organization, it was a big tent and had consistently had very significant non-left-wing representation in its membership, board, and staff.

This was perhaps comparatively easy to achieve because EFF was mainly working on free speech and privacy, and both progressives and libertarians were happy to unite around those things and try to get more of them for everybody, even without necessarily agreeing on other issues.

Maybe "both progressives and libertarians" doesn't feel like that big a tent in the overall scheme of things, but it was a good portion of people who were online by choice early on and who were feeling idealistic about technology.

I'm sure everyone reading this is aware that, as American society has become more polarized, there are fewer and fewer institutions that are successfully operating as big tents in this sense. Somewhat famously ACLU is not. EFF is also not.

EFF is still doing a lot of good work in a non-partisan sense. However, the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.

I again want to be clear for people who are saying "it's no surprise that a political organization is political" that EFF's politics and rhetoric are not what they were in earlier decades. There are many interpretations of that that you might take if you agree with some of the changes (you might feel that they became more politically aware or more sophisticated or something), but the organization's coalition and positioning is really very different from what it was in earlier eras.

(Another more neutral interpretation is that the Internet successfully became a part of everyday life, with the result that more and more historically-offline political issues now have some kind of online component: so maybe it's more of a challenge to deliberately not have a position on a range of "non-tech" politics because people are regularly pointing out how tech and non-tech issues interact more.)

I experienced these changes as an enormous personal tragedy, and it's deeply frustrating for me if people would like to pretend that they didn't happen.

I'm still rooting for them to win most of their court cases.

Community notes has done so much to help obvious and blatantly false information on X. I can't believe that instagram and other platforms haven't implanted it yet.

Their decision to leave X seems mostly centered around engagement numbers. Or at least, that's the reason they led with. And I'm not sure that I believe the numbers they're throwing out.

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

Okay. View counts are public now, but not available on older tweets. But replies, like, and retweet counts are, and shouldn't they scale similarly?

I'm just eyeballing it, but when I look through the EFF's twitter feed now, I see 20-100 likes as typical, with the occasional popular tweet that hits a couple hundred. When I look at their 2018 tweets - you can use the `from:EFF until:2018-04-01` filter on twitter search - the numbers are... The same. Aside from the occasional popular tweet, most other tweets are in the neighborhood of 20-100 likes. Similar for replies and retweets.

I don't understand how this could be if the tweets are being seen 30x less.

Everything old is new again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tSOTQPUQoU

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706120

I don't use social media at all, unless you count HN as such.

I think the only practical consequence is that EFF loses some fraction of audience.

I don't understand, does it cost them something to copy/paste their posts to X?

This reads like the classic Youtuber whose annoyed their views dropped (this almost always amounts to 'people don't actually like your content as much as you thought').

>We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

It's incredibly unlikely someone at X shoved the EFF in a 'low visibility' bucket. It's much more likely they've simply updated their alogorithms and the EFF doesn't hit some engagement metric.

They're still getting 13 million impressions by simply posting tweets, I really don't understand 'taking a stand' here. Instead of 13 million they'll simply get 0... The opportunity cost in the worst case is a human being copy pasting a tweet, there's plenty of software to schedule posts across platforms though, which would make it essentially free even in user time.

Imo, they had a 'personal stance' motivation, and dug deep for any reason to argue for it.

I applaud the move. It's also a little disingenuous to talk about moral standings when the third opening sentence is "The math hasn’t worked out for a while now." If the numbers were working out, would they continue to turn a blind eye on the privacy tracking?

"Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day."

What was wrong with just saying people instead of this nonsense? EFF has been a joke for a while now so has every organization that does something for people. It's just a box that can be ticked when someone asks something stupid like "who protects some imaginary rights".

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

That's a huge drop. It could be changes to the algorithm or it could be their former readers are no longer on X. I suppose it's both.

I wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality.

"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.

I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.

Good. Now leave TikTok and Facebook as well. People who care will find out what you are up to, and people who don't won't see you on social media anyway.

I left Twitter, Facebook, et al about a decade ago. And I can assure you: You will never miss any important development.

The notion that we need to plugged into Twitter, X, whatever, to stay up to date is simply false.

Ahh, eff it, I'm also leaving :-p

>"But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?"

>Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain.

Lol, rubbish.

Leading out with "The numbers aren't working out" is a bit disingenuous. If they were "working out", would you continue to stay? If the answer is "no", then just remove the numbers talking point in your justification altogether.

I left EFF last year. I was a top-tier donor for 20 years, but EFF has changed from neutral rights-focused activism into questionable political activism. Leaving X is just another example of it. Would EFF be leaving X if Elon had not taken over? Does EFF actually believe that there's more free speech on Facebook?

wtf bro

More should follow them. That website is a complete cesspool at this point and if you're not noticing it I worry about how it's gonna effect your psychological wellbeing later in life. The internet is bad enough as it is, but that site is at another degree of awful.

I closed my X account Tuesday evening after the US-Iran ceasefire was announced. Something just snapped finally and I realized there’s no value in monitoring the situation and all these accounts are just monetizing my energy and attention with no value provided.

The only social media I’m going to keep for now is Reddit and YouTube because I think it’s still a net positive for the educational content, but even those are on the chopping block for me. The whole Internet is being capitalized into junk food, people just push out sensationalized low calorie garbage because they get paid per view. It’s sad to see.

So uh, could impressions decrease across the board, not only on X. Like, social platforms have peaked years ago and the downward trend is completely organic.

While I agree with where the EFF is generally coming from, it would make much more sense to just syndicate posts from a libre solution. They could even do adversarial interoperability things. Imagine something akin to a Matrix bridge such that replies on Xitter show up on Masto or some other libre protocol solution, so they (and others) can engage with replies right in the libre ecosystem. Or perhaps every nth of their xits not being the original post verbatim, but rather a link directing people to a web implementation of the libre solution with links to go deeper into that ecosystem. This type of thing would be perfectly in line with the EFF's goals. And not being able to get it together to do even this much is quite sad.

bye!

I feel I am grateful that I never used social media even when they were cool and fun, I always thought it’s vanity “farming”, except now it’s some people’s full time jobs in grifting and being edgy just to farm impressions aka money. Social media is ruined because of monetization, it tapped onto the oldest vulnerability in humanity: greed.

"The math hasn’t worked out for a while now."

How lazy do you have to be to not like this math. They act like tweeting is some sort of significant effort.

At long last. It should be the case with everybody.

Those who stay there because "it's practical", or worse they like it, or worse they support Musk, should be ashamed

> Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes.

X fired a “Trust and Safety” team that was spending time enforcing gender ideology rather than working on scalable solutions to trust and safety. Community Notes wouldn’t have happened without X.

TL;DR

Nobody reads their posts on Twitter any more because most of the people are gone.

So they're still getting a million impressions s month, and that's not interesting Anyway, putting something up on Instagram and then also on X - that's pretty low effort, no? Weird decision...

Also: 1500 posts per year, so around 4 per day - a bit much. There just aren't four important topics to talk about each and every day. Honestly, I wouldn't subscribe to that either. Maybe that's part of why their numbers are going down...

There does seem to be evidence that X (formerly Twitter) is a dying platform, but what surprised me here is that longtime platforms like Snapchat, Reddit and even Pinterest get more MAUs than X - and this is more October 2025:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

It would be really interesting to learn if brands and advertisers are seeing the same thing?