6 ms·
They're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence. Anyway, > Twitter was never a utopia. We
by madeofpalk 6mo ago
They're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point of their existence.
Anyway,
> 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. Musk fired the entire human rights team and laid off staffers in countries where the company previously fought off censorship demands from repressive regimes. Many users left. Today we're joining them.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/eff-leaving-x
- 243341286 6mo ago[flagged]
- MSFT_Edging 6mo agoThose "conservative opinions" were usually violent hate speech. There was no shortage of "conservative opinions" pre-buyout. I think people were just upset certain figures were held to the TOS.
- fooey 6mo agoYeah, the followup to that "censorship of conservative opinions" complaint is always "which opinions are those" It's a perfect analogue for asking confederate fans, "state's rights to do what?"
- fourseventy 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwawaypath 6mo ago[flagged]
- chaosharmonic 6mo agoYou're leaving out "gonna be wild!" and a tirade about personally being let down by Mike Pence.
- mikeyouse 6mo agoWhich of those did Twitter suppress?
- traderj0e 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensions_on_X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensions_on_X search for "gender", at least one was a Congressman
- knowaveragejoe 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwawaypath 6mo agoYes they were: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707893 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707893
- knowaveragejoe 6mo agoI'm convinced you didn't actually look through this and just assume that these were bans for mentioning something like "there are only two genders".
- throwawaypath 6mo agoI did look through this, and it absolutely corroborates people, including sitting politicians, were banned for believing and stating objective facts about human biology. Sorry that facts get in the way of the narrative.
- nosefurhairdo 6mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 6mo ago> twitter was actively working with federal government That's your problem? Wait until you get around to the Snowden Files, you'll be floored.
- traderj0e 6mo ago"working with federal government to censor speech" is a 1A violation on the government's side
- bigyabai 6mo agoPrivately owned platforms are not required to respect the First Amendment. Neither Twitter nor X can guarantee your freedoms.
- traderj0e 6mo agoOf course not. Those platforms have 1A rights. In some cases, the US govt violated those rights by pressuring them to take down viewpoints, hence what I said about "1A violation on the government's side." In other cases, the platform did it all on their own. That's perfectly legal but is also rightfully seen by users as political censorship, something the EFF claims to fight even when it's not from the govt.
- the_why_of_y 6mo agohttps://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-twitter-and-hunter-bidens-laptop/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-referre...
- traderj0e 6mo ago
- CodeWriter23 6mo ago[flagged]
- lacy_tinpot 6mo ago"were usually violent hate speech" Did we forget "Vote blue no matter who"??? It was often as mundane as disagreeing with ANY democrat politician/their policies. Sometimes it wasn't even a right-wing voice, but from more Left leaning voices that got banned/ostracized.
- MSFT_Edging 6mo agoI can't edit any more, but for all those saying "they got banned for saying 'men can't get pregnant'", I can guarantee 9 times out of 10, there was some imagery of a trans person hanging themselves in the comments. That's how far-right opinions work. A small wedge to normalize the violent message that comes next. A "man getting pregnant" didn't hurt them, but the deluge of death threats from the stochastic response sure hurt a lot more people. I've spent way too much time on twitter. That site is a cesspit but you cannot reasonably try to say "they're just opinions". It was organized. "influencers" received money to stoke harassment campaigns. Without moderation, aka cutting off the people stoking the harassment flames, it becomes a Nazi bar, just like it is today. Here is an example of what the bans were trying to prevent, look at the comments of someone's last tweet. They killed themselves. The replies are who complained about censorship: https://x.com/burntfishie/status/1918223771313561872?s=20 https://x.com/burntfishie/status/1918223771313561872?s=20
- zryn 6mo agoIt wasn't just far-right messaging being censored. Left-leaning feminists were being banned for stating that men aren't women, see e.g. https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-the-silencing-of-women/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/11/28/meghan-murphy-and-t....
- faefox 6mo agoYou can tell conservative opinions are censored and suppressed by the way they're constantly shoved down our throats every hour of every day.
- xigoi 6mo ago[flagged]
- hn_acc1 6mo agoOn X? Citation needed. Elsewhere too.
- traderj0e 6mo agoYeah they're not anymore. Woke opinions were getting shoved until that abruptly stopped a bit before Trump's second term. Which is weird because this didn't happen in his first term. Now we've got Amazon promoting the Melania movie. On Twitter in particular, the woke shoving stopped the moment Musk took over, replaced with it shoving whatever Musk is saying. They're doing less censorship now but are also heavily promoting him.
- xigoi 6mo agoI don’t use X so don’t know about that one, but I see a plenty of “something something trans people eat the rich ACAB kill all men” on Bluesky.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago[flagged]
- unethical_ban 6mo agoSince the person you responded to got flagged/dead, I want to make sure they and everyone else who might think like them listens to this (an hour long, so yay attention span) https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a https://www.podbean.com/ew/dir-35im6-2c0a994a "As the Senate debates the SAVE America Act amid unfounded claims of voter fraud, Jon is joined by Georgetown Research Professor Renée DiResta and Platformer editor Casey Newton to examine what actually threatens our elections. Together, they investigate how algorithms are engineered to push users toward platform owners' preferred ideologies, explore the incentives driving Silicon Valley's rightward shift, and discuss how Republicans have weaponized disinformation to undermine electoral trust and rewrite voting rules in their favor." One topic they cover is the manner in which the Biden admin was communicating with big tech about mis/dis-information, and the multiple ways the Right has either blown it way out of proportion by not getting the facts right, and the way the Trump admin has been doing as much or worse than Biden admin ever did.
- mghackerlady 6mo agoConservative opinions like "[group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy" and "we need a white homeland" If you aren't kicking nazis out of your bar, it'll become a nazi bar. Twitter stopped kicking out the nazis
- xigoi 6mo ago> [group of people] are evil and don't deserve to be happy" Most of the times I’ve seen such statements on Twitter, the [group of people was one of: men, white people, straight people, cisgender people. Something tells me those statements were not made by conservatives…
- mghackerlady 6mo agoI don't deny those opinions exist, but they aren't the ones being propped up by elon
- xigoi 6mo agoI thought we were talking about pre-Musk Twitter.
- surgical_fire 6mo agoWhat censorship? Conservative talking points were fucking everywhere, and still are.
- zone411 6mo ago[flagged]
- surgical_fire 6mo agoThis Hunter Biden shit is a good example. It was all over the place all the time. I don't even live in the US and kept stumbling on people talking about it in social media. Conservative talking points are everywhere, even when I try to avoid them myself (for example, on fucking YouTube I am often recommended right wing bullshit when I view anything more political). Right wingers are always very soy. For people that for years complained about oppression olympics they can't seem to stop crying about being oppressed even when in power.
- unselect5917 6mo agoWell we can tell where you stand when you describe their views as "talking points". Which isn't surprising on HN (reddit but more wordy).
- surgical_fire 6mo agoSorry, does "talking point" have any negative connotation? English is not my native language - I use it in a neutral manner, including for things I agree with. And yes, I don't agree with right wing bullshit, but I wasn't being particularly abrasive.
- 0123456789ABCDE 6mo agocare to share some quotes from those "conservative opinions" that were censored?
- zone411 6mo agohttps://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-york-post-hunter-biden-hacked-materials-1234820449/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-y...
- hn_acc1 6mo agoHow are those "conservative opinions"? Are you saying the whole thing was right-wing fan-fiction?
- MallocVoidstar 6mo agoYeah, I remember when the "Twitter Files" were being released and it turned out that Twitter was illegitimately censoring leaked nudes of Hunter Biden. Whyever would non-consensually posted nudes be taken down other than the suppression of conservatism?
- unselect5917 6mo agoThey were also censoring Biden's ties to Ukraine. If you'd actually read any coverage on it that wasn't left wing, you would have known that instead of spinning up this strawman version of what happened.
- MallocVoidstar 6mo agoI'm not making a strawman, there were specific post IDs cited by the Twitter Files as being illegitimate suppression, you could stick them into the Wayback Machine and see that they were literally just photos of Hunter Biden's dick.
- deathanatos 6mo agoThey … did, though? You're presumably referencing Missouri v. Biden, to which the EFF did file an amicus[1]. In it, they note, > Many platforms have potentially problematic “trusted flagger” programs in which certain groups and individuals enjoy “some degree of priority in the processing of notices > Of course, governmental participation in content moderation processes raises First Amendment issues not present with non-governmental inputs With their overall opinion being something like "content moderation is normal, the government flagging content is also normal, and there are instances where the government's flagging of content moderation can be fine & not run afoul of 1A, but there are instances where it can, and we urge the court to think" Note in this case, the platform was removing the content. The government was, in one respect, merely asking. (There were assertions that in other instances, such as public statements, the case was less so.) The court eventually ruled, and the ruling I saw from the 5th circuit seemed reasonable. (I think that was a preliminary injunction. AIUI, the case as a whole was never ruled on, because the Trump administration took over.) [1]: https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief https://www.eff.org/document/missouri-v-biden-amicus-brief
- ethanrutherford 6mo agoclaiming there was rampant "censorship of conservative opinions" is about as honest as claiming that the Romans were being persecuted by first century christians.
- traderj0e 6mo agoA few of these were actual calls to violence, but most were about political opinion https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banned_from_social_media_platforms https://ballotpedia.org/Elected_officials_suspended_or_banne... They also banned NY Post for publishing that Hunter Biden laptop story. Which as much of a nothingburger as that story was, it's insane to get banned for that.
- malfist 6mo agoDamn that Biden administration for getting the NY Post in trouble for posting crap while Trump was in office
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- triceratops 6mo agoWhich ones?
- aeternum 6mo ago[flagged]
- causal 6mo agoWhat is the agenda? You're hinting at some conspiracy but I have no idea what it could even be
- aeternum 6mo ago[flagged]
- madeofpalk 6mo agoIt's not some big secret. You're trying to invent a conspiracy when there is none. There's one particular website that they don't like, and they see declining engagement from, so they leave. There's other websites that might have less engagement, but they do like it, so they stay there. Then there's other websites that might have similar ideological disdain for, but they get very broad reach from, so they reluctantly stay. I really don't see what the big deal is with trying to reach a broad audience.
- causal 6mo ago> lines like this that make the agenda far more clear: "Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day." What does that make clear?? Stop hinting and just say what you mean...?
- 0ckpuppet 6mo agoTwitter never cared about users rights. Read Matt Taibbi's congresional testimony on Twitter's censorship machine.
- kgwxd 6mo agoRead, was bs, as expected from matt
- myko 6mo agoIt was very interesting because it came to light the administration in power at the time, trump, leaned heavily on Twitter to promote what they wanted and hide they wanted hid. Meanwhile Biden's campaign requested revenge porn be removed and Matt and friends got extremely upset about that and called it government overreach (Biden wasn't in office at the time, of course). Very funny when you think about it, but sad too
- 0ckpuppet 6mo agoYou're equivocating. Biden camp and DNC was requesting and demanding that politically negative comments be removed. If you're going to tell a story tell the whole story.
- tyre 6mo agoIf you’re citing Matt Taibbi as a trustworthy source, man, I don’t know. He’s up there with Bari Weiss for “they’re either intentionally bad faith, stupid, or both” levels of nuance. These are not serious people.
- unselect5917 6mo agoI not only read what he wrote, I read the screenshots of OG twitter. And what he said mirrored what they said. They were incredibly one sided an censorious as hell. Your post is basically just an ad hominem. A fallacy.
- angoragoats 6mo ago
- commandlinefan 6mo ago> Of course they're ideological. That's the whole point Yes, but their ideology _was_ free-speech absolutism. This move, and this statement, suggests that they're moving away from that ideology to one of selectively free speech.
- basisword 6mo agoPlease explain. How does this suggest they no longer value free speech?
- nandomrumber 6mo agoThat’s not what the comment you replied to said. They said the EFF’s ideology use to be free speech absolutism. From the EFF post linked to that we are discussing here: Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. <snip> neither is pushing every user to the fediverse when there are circumstances like: <snip> Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information. You're isolated and rely on online spaces to connect with your community. That very much makes it sound like the EFF values free speech, but only if that speech is speech they agree with. What about if your anti-abortion fund uses X to spread crucial information. What about if you’re isolated and rely on X to connect with your community? What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer? The EFF used to be free speech absolutists, it’s evident they be taken over by progressive liberals who favour free speech they agree with. Look in to the history of cases they have litigated. There’s definitely at least some where I disagreed with the content of the speech, but agreed with the right to say it and that the EFF were correct in supporting the case.
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo ago>> Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day. > What if you’re not a young person, a person of color, queer, an activists, nor an organizer? People who aren't young, of color, queer, activists, or organizers, use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook every day, too. There's no good reason for an organization to have a presence on every social media platform under the sun, but there is one for limiting the overhead you have to do (and also for minimizing social media usage in general).