wemptronics
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User ID: 95
What does "mission accomplished" mean in this context?
Mission accomplished: X is free enough, or has low enough walls to the garden, where we (EFF) can leave to focus efforts elsewhere. It doesn't really make sense in context of posting to additional platform, but could be one explanation why "X is no longer where the fight is happening." This is contradicted by other parts so I can't mistake the announcement for something like it.
Who would be wanting to celebrate and who would be wanting to not celebrate, in their (or your) view?
People who dislike X and its owner tend to treat evidence of its failure as a team win. Non-profits making announcements of departure that get a lot of attention are one type of evidence. I assumed too much that this was common knowledge. Here are a selection replies to the Bluesky post that mirrors X announcement:
- "Wait, there are still real users on twHitler?"
- "Congratulations on your exodus. We know you've stayed there to fight the good fight as long as you could. Some people just don't want to be educated."
- "Bravely leaving a cesspit of CSAM and violence years late. Well done!"
- "Twitter is a war crime scene."
'About time!' is a form of celebration with an I'm better than you caveat. People who might not want to celebrate are like Schoen, or Nybbler below, long time supporters who want them to do the EFF things that do not include confused departure announcements on social media platforms.
wemptronics
5d ago
It is possible whoever is in charge of social media is convinced the algorithm is unfairly targeting them, or used that reasoning to convince other, more important people it was the case. That might not effect standard going on's if you've been happy as a donor otherwise. A funnier alternative is they genuinely believed they were throwing an exit post into the void and were baffled to find the site still functioned.
The NAACP uses X, weirdo DSA caucuses and committees use X, the Human Rights Campaign manages to create engagement on the platform despite their message being much more out of the favor. The ACLU, who the EFF works closely with, is not active on the site. So, yeah, it's probably not a great thing if you've supported them for the traditional mission.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. Twitter was never a utopia. We've criticized the platform for about as long as it's been around. Still, Twitter did deserve recognition from time to time for vociferously fighting for its users' rights. That changed. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue.
EFF exists to protect people's digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms. Our continued presence on other platforms like Facebook and TikTok is not an endorsement. We stay because the people there deserve access to info, too. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. EFF takes on big fights, and we win by putting our time, skills, and members’ support where they will have the most impact. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and http://eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. [formatted tweets into paragraphs mine]
The EFF will leave the platform for others like TikTok, a choice it is careful to point out is not an "endorsement" because those walled gardens are still in desperate need of their attention. There is no mistaking the announcement for an emphatic Mission Accomplished which makes the non-endorsements more awkward. The message is also complicated by an attached blog post which offers almost entirely different reasoning. Take your pick of whichever reason for why they're leaving. I translate it as, "Celebrate, if you want, but don't worry if you don't want to celebrate."
The timing of this feels offbeat, why now and not a major exodus? There is no real additional cost involved in publishing to an additional social media platform like X. I doubt there's much additional cost in finding ways to more effectively increase reach on X, if that were the issue. I compared the EFF activity between Bluesky and X, there is no indication they interact with replies or even read them. It looks like the EFF publishes the latest release, pushes it to all platforms, and that's about it. The EFF is apparently not interested in being convinced, because they locked replies to their announcement only after hundreds of replies.
The EFF is the most well known internet rights advocacy group. At one point there was significant overlap between the Pirate Party's of the world and the EFF-- fighting against DMCA (ab)use, SLAPP law suits, surveillance, and anti-privacy laws. Fighting for the democratization of knowledge and content. By the mid-late 2010s they were already into a more progressively tinged advocacy. This 2019 explainer focuses on content moderation, but is mostly framed in language about marginalized voices, or how the bad type of content moderation that targets transphobia can harm trans people. They continued to fight against government censorship, including through Biden era "jawboning" or informal coercion, but if the ACLU is any indication this may be the result of individual interest within the organization. As these individuals age out there's fewer people willing to pick up the mission aligned, but unpopular cases on account of the organization now being more partisan.
Seth Schoen, a privacy and security consultant, worked at EFF for nearly 20 years and wrote on HackerNews about his experience up 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.
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.
Seth alludes to the free internet fuck yeah coalition that helped build the org. It was a movement that had a popular form represented among a libertarian-progressive milieu. Congregants would find their way to places like reddit, where they applauded stunts that mocked state surveillence, rallied around legislation, and laughed along with the Daily Show segments at the expense of greedy corporations. A different kind of cultural moment for a different sort of culture war. Without another group to pick up the slack, as FIRE did after the ACLU's drift, the signals sent here do not provide a lot of long term faith in the they still do good work assessment.
I've yet to read a convincing argument for why China or the Chinese people are incapable of building an imposing global empire. It has not happened yet, which is a good reason to believe China is not currently in possession of an empire with specific qualities. Empires aren't built in a day! I would like to know the essentialist reasons why China is limited in this way due to immutable characteristics, culture, geography, etc.
Most of the Western perspective I read on this boils down to:
America also tends to avoid direct control in most of its imperial relationships and, as @Tanista wrote, was also once disinterested in far away interests. I can buy that the CPC today is not interested in certain ideological impositions as something like liberalism in the 20th century. I'm less sure this is something to bet the future on. The CPC is young and young upstarts tend to create ambitious men that shape new understandings. Romanize, Anglicize, Liberalize-- all verbs developed during a process of expansion. The broader understanding of Sinicization as limited to an economic context similarly feels overstated to me, and maybe just wrong.
Are the constraints that helped shaped a Sinocentric understanding, material or otherwise, a thousand years ago the same as today or tomorrow? Also, is it really the case that the European psyche is, in fact, the only type on Earth prone to use something understood as unpleasant coercion in a global or imperial context? I doubt this, but maybe there's a good reason to believe it. To me, ambition, inertia, and the largest navy in the world all seem like very powerful things to bet against, to assume a kind of ceiling in ambition to shape the world based on cultural vibes, history, geopolitics, or what have you.
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