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The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced they are "logging off of X."
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.
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.
Kinda overdetermined. The impression count thing is either a lie or incompetence or both, but I don't think they even expect people to believe it so much as for it to be a useful rallying cry.
Like with Julia Serano's not dismissing perspectives really being about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", it's interesting to see the mask come off, and with it a bit of the face, but it's kinda just making a thing that happened a decade ago common knowledge.
More critically, I'll notice that Seth Schoen is famous for the DeCSS haiku, and I can't find him mentioning Defense Distributed a single time on the entire internet. Lest that be taken as cherry-picking my fixation, looking at his HackerNews profile (and webpage, and posts at EFF) has a dearth of high-profile examples while there were a bunch of high-profile examples, and I'm noticing how carefully he dodges specifics even now.
That's not to blame him, because I were the mask in my real name too. But it's a thing that happened a decade ago.
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