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The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
by phillipcarter 6mo ago
The problem they're not talking about is that for all the X users they could potentially help, their messages will be actively suppressed by the platform owner.
Nate Silver, famously popular (...lol) with the online left, made a post about this recently: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak-show https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...
EFF is, politically, left wing.
- ecshafer 6mo agoEFF used to stand for a cause that was neither left nor right.
- tailscaler2026 6mo agoEFF still does. MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
- 833 6mo agoThat is incredible rewriting of history.
- CursedSilicon 6mo agoHow? He's "investigating" CNN right now for...something? Something about them reporting on the Iran war
- saulapremium 6mo agoNo, that is the obvious and clear truth. MAGA has done a pretty good job at making the opposite appear true, though.
- thaumasiotes 6mo agoTrue as stated, but if you generalize the statement to "enemy concepts", who decided that? For example, where did the term "freeze peach" come from?
- ETH_start 6mo agoBlue Sky heavily censors its platform
- theshrike79 6mo ago[citation needed] No citation needed for Twitter censorship, just badmouth Elmo and you'll see what happens to your reach.
- nilespotter 6mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SnAJOluk1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SnAJOluk1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC64XJl2mXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC64XJl2mXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhTVHeQK10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZhTVHeQK10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRF80IWYX8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKRF80IWYX8
- tovej 6mo agoYoutube videos are not reliable sources.
- theshrike79 6mo agoSo people specifically get there to be as big of an ass as they can be and then get all pikachu.jpg when they get banned? It's a private platform, not a public utility. They can choose their customers.
- ETH_start 6mo agoThe point of these videos is that no platform that values freedom of expression and diverse points of view would have auto-ban systems for the kinds of things that he said. X is massively more liberal in what it allows and what it tolerates before it will ban someone than Blue Sky. So the EFF's claims are totally disingenuous and I don't think people should stand for it no matter where they stand politically.
- datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
- ecshafer 6mo agoMassie, a republican, and Rand Paul, another republican, are by far the most supportive of free speech politicans in congress.
- root_axis 6mo agoBy what metric?
- IG_Semmelweiss 6mo agoThe freedom index is a good start. https://freedomindex.us/us/ https://freedomindex.us/us/ Massie has 99% And Paul was at 96 % in the 117th congress https://freedomindex.us/us/legislators/session/11/sort/sd/ https://freedomindex.us/us/legislators/session/11/sort/sd/
- cwal37 6mo agoMaybe a good start if you're a specific flavor of person, but it would be pretty amazing to claim it's an objective observer of "freedom" when the Freedom Index is a John Birch Society project, which is an ultraconservative advocacy group. Just because it's called the freedom index, doesn't mean it's concerned with the freedom of all man, look to the civil rights movement for easy examples of how JBS' "freedom" is only for certain people. Hell, click over to the JBS website and you'll see Alex Jones and Steve Bannon front and center on their home page. It's crazy to refer to one of their projects as some neutral arbiter.
- bjoli 6mo agoWhoa! > We have assigned pluses to the yeas because Congress has every duty to forbid grossly illicit acts of sexual perversion in the armed forces. It is full of things that are not what I would consider freedoms. Freedoms of companies to exploit oil reserves is one. Voting no to taxpayer funded healthcare is a good thing,apparently. Edit: and I didnt look further than 3 clicks away. They are not hiding their political bias very well.
- fzeroracer 6mo ago
- pessimizer 6mo ago> ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable This was a bipartisan agreement. Democrats just say "nothingburger" a lot when you talk about it. The EFF is, and has always been, a libertarian org with a narrow focus.
- jerrythegerbil 6mo agoPerhaps they still do, particularly because that’s exactly what they stand for. The overall shift in perspective and narrative to the right makes them appear left. If the narrative of a platform is intentionally divisive and making them appear left, leaving is the only way to both be center and present as center. A warped perspective is hard to spot if you’ve been staring at it too long.
- ecshafer 6mo agoThe only congressman who would actually support the EFF in digital rights is Massie, a republican. Reading their post they throw out every progressive buzz word for the omnicause, they are clearly aligning themselves with the progressive wing of the Democrats. The wing which is ironically some of the most anti-free speech in all of American politics.
- 0dayz 6mo agoNothing said here is of substance and instead mere projection of speculation. If they came out openly as gay as an organization but kept their current stated goal of digital freedom, they still would be a digital rights organization I do not see what driveling about supposed progressive politics makes fighting for digital rights bad.
- kelipso 6mo agoAn organization aligning itself with progressives means they will only support a certain set of digital rights that align with progressive politics and not others. I guess you can still call yourself a digital rights organization if you want by you won’t be seen as legitimate by both sides of the aisle.
- 0dayz 6mo agoWhich digital rights are exempt if you are subscribing to the "progressive" side of politics? And even if true how does that make it suddenly an organization one shouldn't support? Is saving one of two arms better than saving none because you can't save the other?
- claytongulick 6mo agoThat's when I would donate to them, annually. I still have two t-shirts.
- michaelbrave 6mo agoI don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.
- dannyobrien 6mo agoI worked at EFF during that time, and this is a weird story that I’ve not heard before. EFF doesn’t let interns write blog posts (at least not with a lot of supervision) and certainly wouldn’t sack someone for getting something wrong — partly because that’s a terrible lesson to teach someone just starting out in law or activism, but also and more pragmatically it risks being a PR nightmare. I concede it might be a mangled version of some other incident — EFF’s network neutrality policy during that time was /extremely/ subtle and we often struggled to express it without annoying some colleague organization or another. Do you remember any other details, or link to coverage of it?
- tovej 6mo agoI read parent as saying the intern worked for the Trump admin.
- michaelbrave 6mo agoyes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.
- dannyobrien 6mo ago
- watwut 6mo agoRight went full fascist. Being moderate fascist is not an apolitical position despite being in the middle.
- Redoubts 6mo ago> Nate Silver, [...] made a post about this recently Yeah and he put together an insane chart + data that's not tethered to reality.
- phillipcarter 6mo agoIt's quite tethered to reality.
- techblueberry 6mo agoWhat makes it not tethered to reality? Do you have a different chart?
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago> EFF is, politically, left wing. EFF is more like classical liberal. They generally oppose regulation of speech/tech and oppressive laws like DMCA 1201 (anti-circumvention) but promote things in the nature of antitrust like right-to-repair. Everything is required to be crammed into a box now so that often gets called "left" because the tech companies (also called "left") have found it more effective to pay off the incumbents in GOP-controlled states when they don't like right-to-repair laws, although Hollywood ("left" again) are traditionally the ones pressuring Democrats to sustain the horrible anti-circumvention rule when they're in power. It turns out trying to fit everything into one of two boxes is pretty unscientific.
- empressplay 6mo ago> EFF is more like classical liberal. I mean, they were, but that no longer appears to be the case.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cbsmith 6mo agoAppears being the operative word.