EFF Is Leaving X (eff.org) 181
After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report: 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. [...]
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control.
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control.
Late to the party (Score:5, Insightful)
All the cool kids left long ago.
Re:Late to the party (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Late to the party (Score:5, Interesting)
No problem, EFF hasn't been cool for a while now. Remember what they did to RMS?
The EFF is probably the most important advocacy organization that educates and acts on behalf of normal people's digital rights, freedoms, and privacy. The legal actions they take in support of these are meaningful. Now that the CFPB has been dismantled and the FCC and FTC had their teeth and spines removed, groups like EFF are the only thing we have in the US pushing back against millions of dollars of corporate lobbying money.
I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding RMS. Aside from the open letter [eff.org] they published after he was re-elected to the FSF board, which is fine to disagree with (I do), I don't think EFF did anything to him. Plenty of people pointed angry fingers at him in 2019 but AFAIK his resignation from the FSF was his own decision.
Re: Late to the party (Score:5, Interesting)
The cost thing has me wondering: What is the cost? Particularly when they mention LinkedIn, which goes out of its way to spam you anytime you do anything with it, (in my experience, they will provide anybody access to ALL PII you give to them, for a price) and whatever money they're paying them almost certainly exceeds the $8 they didn't have to spend on twitter. Or the fact that LinkedIn has a crap interface that they almost certainly have to spend more time fighting with than anything else.
Bluesky and mastodon should have basically the same cost, namely that of the time required to post there, with about 1/10th of the audience. So I'm calling bullshit on cost. Nor do I care why they're leaving twitter even, but they're literally trying to insult the intelligence of their audience here.
What's more telling is who they're staying with Fecebook...Seriously? The most privacy-hostile one of them all? The one who's CEO publicly threw a tantrum after Google and Apple removed their ability to passively collect your location data 24/7? The one who is putting by far the most lobbying effort towards OS level age verification laws so they can blame somebody else for their own misconduct?
Fecebook and LinkedIn are, IMO, the only two actively deserving abandonment. Gotta have "who needs privacy?" (Facebook) and sleezball salesmen (LinkedIn) demographic the most, I guess? Whatever floats your boat. If you're going to go out of your way to make sure everybody knows you're leaving a social media platform to make some kind of statement, can't you at least be consistent with your own statements and values? That's kind of important if your mission is entirely political.
Re: Late to the party (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading between the lines here, the way I interpret this is that they're basically doing this to send the message directly to X staff: "We think our actual drop in views is because you've altered your algorithm to de-prioritize our posts, but we have no direct proof of that so we're just going to take our ball and go home and tell everyone else it's because it's just not worth it anymore."
That may be pure speculation on my part, but the subtext seemed clear to me.
Re: Late to the party (Score:2)
Possibly, though I doubt anybody is actively deprioritizing them if that's what they believe. By their own statements, they had 15 million impressions from twitter last year, and whatever the reason may be, they determined that having zero is preferable.
If it's a cost thing as they claim...they're supposedly technically proficient, yet they can't figure out a way to automate syndication? That's just the most bullshit upon bullshit line of reasoning they could have come up with. Have a bit of integrity. I do
Re: Late to the party (Score:4, Interesting)
I read it as X has grown in users and bots over the past 7 years. There's a lot more activity on the platform today as opposed to 7 years ago. With more users and more overall posts, it makes it harder to stand out. That's what I got out of the summary.
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It's mostly bots and trolls, not actual users like normal people think of the term.
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What's more telling is who they're staying with Fecebook...Seriously?
Facebook is where all the normies are. It isn't about the EFF sticking to their principles, it's that on X they were shouting into a void. If you're not posting political ragebait, the algorithm doesn't give you the time of day.
Re: Late to the party (Score:2)
15 million impressions last year isn't what I'd consider a void. That's still over a million a month. Think about that. Just how much were they actually paying for that million a month? I doubt it's anywhere near what advertisers pay for the same amount.
Let's assume they paid somebody to spend a minute to copy-paste each post (which is dumb to not just automate, but whatever) that means they were spending about 40 hours per year, or one week for one person, for 15 million impressions. I don't know if they w
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All the cool kids left long ago.
Are you referring to Twitter or the FFS? GPL use in new projects has been steadily declining. The "cool kids" are going MIT and Apache.
... things evolve, newer entries make improvements.
App usage, License usage,
Sounds like Musk's greatest fear (Score:4, Insightful)
Irrelevance.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
They're going to Wayland?!
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"Erm... sinners to repentance?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Two sieg heils from the owner on national TV? No big.
Engagement down 97%? We have our principles, sir!
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Re:"Erm... sinners to repentance?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Lot of good it ultimately did, though. Last time I was crossing over a pedestrian bridge on my e-scooter, I noticed a sign informing that it's illegal to hold up political signs from the bridge. I should've taken a picture of it.
Florida actually has a lot of anti-protest laws of that nature. Step outside of the "free speech zone" or stay after the scheduled protest ends = free ride in a police car.
If you had the time and resources to fight it, you might be able to get it overturned as unconstitutional, but they figure most people aren't going to fight that battle, so you really don't have free speech.
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Post a video of yourself doing the exact same thing and we can judge.
Re:"Erm... sinners to repentance?" (Score:4, Insightful)
Post a video of yourself doing the exact same thing and we can judge.
The few times I've seen Nazis marching around, they were all wearing masks. You know, the same things they had a huge problem with during the height of the Covid pandemic. Probably because they don't want to be identified and fired from their jobs.
It never was about the masks, it was about that these sort of people just can't be decent human beings.
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Record a video of yourself doing it then.
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Sure Jan: https://www.reddit.com/media?u... [reddit.com]
It was a fucking Nazi salute. Own it, and fuck off.
A post, or an EFF post? (Score:2, Interesting)
From the article...
To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]
... do they mean a "general" post on twitter today receives less than 3% of the views, or an EFF post on twitter receives less than 3% of the views that it did? Because I think the "general" post on twitter today receives prolly a quarter of the views. The rest is on them.
Twitter is twitter, and I'm sure there is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B here, but come on. But let's be honest and ask when was the last time the EFF got a real headline?
In fact, I see this ann
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"But let's be honest and ask when was the last time the EFF got a real headline?"
They haven't actually aligned with their mission in a long time. It essentially costs nothing to mirror their posts to X alongside the rest of the list and notice they list Bluesky, the official network of mass censorship and authoritarian repression, at the top of their list. This is a political ad and it is diametrically opposed to the principals the EFF CLAIMS to stand for, attacking the platform that promotes freedom and pr
Re: A post, or an EFF post? (Score:2)
You think that BlueSky users scare people, and then you admit to being part of a community that consistently produces mass murderers. You live in a severely fucked up funhouse mirror type of world.
Tell someone you are an active BlueSky users and they will assume you vote a certain way. Tell someone you participated in 4chan at any point in its history and they immediately become afraid that you will go on a killing spree.
Re: A post, or an EFF post? (Score:5, Informative)
I quit Instagram for same reason. After Facebook moved them to their algorithm, I got one tenth the likes/interaction, with a pitch to pay $$ to boost interaction
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okay that is dumb (Score:3, Insightful)
They know there are programs that can cross-post social media right? Like it literally takes zero effort to get that engagement?
And if Bluesky and Mastodon each get more engagement than X, I'll eat one of my hats.
Lastly I was worried that this had something to do with Wayland and I was about to be super angry.
Re:okay that is dumb (Score:5, Informative)
Bluesky, the official network of mass censorship and authoritarian repression
[citation needed]
Re:okay that is dumb (Score:4, Informative)
For the best user experience, we suggest that clients in the AT Protocol ecosystem follow this pattern: have at least one built-in moderation service, and allow additional user-chosen mod services to be layered in on top. The Bluesky app is a space that we create and maintain, and we want to provide a positive environment for our users, so our moderation service is built-in. On top of that, the additional services that users can subscribe to creates a lot of options within the app. However, if users disagree with Bluesky’s application-level moderation, they can choose to use another client on the network with its own moderation system. There are additional nuances to infrastructure-level moderation, which we will discuss below, but most content moderation happens at the application level.
Since content at the relay level is untied to the labeling at the AppView / Client level, and only content that is illegal to host is filtered at the relay. The default Bluesky client and associated moderation service does trend left on the labelling. But then also exposes the ability for people to set their own actions on those labels and to subscribe to additional labelers on top.
So interestingly, with the ability to filter and set moderation settings for those labels, an individual could do something like disable the default of "warn" on the "intolerant" label and filter for that label and see exclusively content that default Bluesky moderation service finds intolerant. Or start a labeler to label content that they find objectionable and have people subscribe to their labels. Or start an entirely separate client / AppView with a default moderation labeler that fits their political bent reusing all the content the relays and convince people to use their client and accept their defaults for labels instead.
But pragmatically, a person who has a choice of alternate services with active communities with opaque moderation and promotion that align with their views will most likely dislike a service even if the other underlying technology is freer.
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I guess this explains why one can search for "pussy" but not for "penis".
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Rage Quitting over not getting enough views. (Score:2, Interesting)
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There would be no sense in quitting for that. Their point is: We want to quit X. Now that we don't need it anymore, we finally can.
LinkedIn? (Score:2, Insightful)
LinkedIn is supposed to be a job posting site. Political advocacy doesn't belong there.
So EFF is deliberately embracing the enshittification of the internet.
It's a pity, too. They've done some very important work in the past. But now, they're part of the problem.
Re:LinkedIn? (Score:5, Interesting)
Correction: LinkedIn was originally just a job-and-resume posting site. And while the vast majority of its end users still treat it as such, the site's owners have been desperately trying to turn it into something else - more of a Facebook/Twitter hybrid - for almost a decade now.
I log into LinkedIn maybe once every couple of years. When I do, the first thing I always see is a huge number of pointless drivel posts that have no place on a "job-and-resume posting site", which in turn reminds me of why LinkedIn sucks so much.
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Correction: LinkedIn was originally just a job-and-resume posting site. And while the vast majority of its end users still treat it as such, the site's owners have been desperately trying to turn it into something else - more of a Facebook/Twitter hybrid - for almost a decade now.
EFF is only one of many contributors to the enshittification, including the owners. But they are certainly guilty of contributing.
Re:LinkedIn? (Score:5, Interesting)
So Sam Altman should be allowed to post multiple articles on LinkedIn about how AI is going to transform workplaces and society, and the EFF should just remain silent?
I don't think so.
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So Sam Altman should be allowed to post multiple articles on LinkedIn about how AI is going to transform workplaces and society
Who says so? Certainly not me.
Since your premise is stupid, the rest isn't worth reading.
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LinkedIn is full of articles about AI and the workplace.
So *your* premise, that LinkedIn is only for resumes, is completely at odds with reality.
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Have a grown up explain to you what "supposed to" means, dumbass.
You have agreed with me that LinkedIn is shit, and you're too fucking stupid to know it.
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Guess you had to resort to petty insults since you are losing so many arguments in the thread you started.
- "supposed to" is not a synonym for "I wish it was"
- I haven't made any statements about LinkedIn's quality one way or another.
- I do not plan to respond to any more of your posts.
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EFF isn't dumping X because of any confusion over the line between politics and work. They're dumping X because nobody bothers with it any more.
Why do you supposed nobody bothers with it any more?
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PETA was never about animal rights. They have always been about virtue signaling and trying to control other people's lives. And nothing else.
They were shittified from day one.
Copy and paste is exhausting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Copy and paste is exhausting (Score:4, Informative)
It's worse than that, because with proper skill, it isn't even a copy/pasta. It is one app that posts to everything all at once. Even the social media places that didn't make the list.
Buffer, Hootsuite, Metricool, Robopost or Later ... just off the top of my head.
One could probably tweak posts for each platform with AI effectively.
Yawn! Never joined any of those either! (Score:4, Interesting)
Social Media is like a second job with no pay for most users. The ROI on being their sock puppet is pretty low.
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Yeah, the privacy aspect of EFF doesn't align with social media in general IMHO.
Are they trying to "earn" some $ from social media? That's a silly goal, but might be a nice side benefit.
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Disclaimer
I subscribe an email address to the eff so I hear about their activities. And I use Let Encrypt ssl certs when ever possible.
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Replace "being their sock puppet" with "contributing" and that pretty accurately describes OSS as well. Especially in the age of AI.
meh (Score:5, Insightful)
X is basically just fascist edgelords uselessly spending money to try and convince other fascist edgelords of things they already believe. It was hilarious though how mad they all get when liberals left the platform.
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Which is why what the EFF is doing makes no sense. They say they want to save time and resources to better focus on what?
Re: meh (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's also why the liberals leaving was stupid - they needed to be trying to convince the conservatives, not be retreating to an echo chamber.
I think a number of people left not to retreat to an echo chamber, but because every post, every hit on X means money for Elon Musk.
Most people leaving don't care about Musk (Score:2)
Twitter was purchased to create a right wing propaganda tool for Musk because he depends heavily on government contracts and after interfering in t
Re:meh (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who was in a toxic relationship with my ex, and had similar experiences with some family members, some people aren't willing to be convinced and the effort spent trying can often be better used almost anywhere else.
What the hell is X? Not X11? (Score:3)
I never had an Twitter-Account but lurked around a couple of interesting Hashtags sometimes. Never though enjoyed it.
I can not remember when I last used X.
Totally irrelevant now. Reddit... okeyish. Lemmy... partially worse than Reddit, Mastadon... maybe I was there by accident sometimes. In fact I am using the discussion forums of Youtube a lot lately.
The real problem is disguised. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is the list they are staying with ...
Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube
So, where did the audience go? It didn't go to the existing places from 20-8 years ago. And I doubt it went to the two new kids.
What this tells me is that their audience is aging/dying off, and the younger generations aren't there in numbers. This requires little to no political inferences to understand. It is easy to mistake one for the other.
Yes, I am a Boomer. I don't rely upon AI to tell me what to think. I am also a Libertarian and interested in Privacy and been a long time proponent of Open Source. Maybe figure out what intersections to the younger generations align and go there.
Re:The real problem is disguised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this really about impressions? (Score:2)
Wasn’t one of the issues of the Twitter of old the amount of bot accounts? Maybe what EFF is seeing today is what their real impression count has always been.
Also, 13 million impressions last year is 13 million impressions. What was the cost to EFF to produce those 1500 posts? EFF needs all the impressions it can get.
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We have no idea what bot traffic on Twitter is like now. Twitter's per-acquisition botcounting methodology seemed reasonable. I don't know if things have improved, but I stopped using it when it seemed like it was ha
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The Decision that Destroyed Twitter/X (Score:5, Interesting)
Musk aside, the #1 change that absolutely destroyed X as a platform was by default sorting a users feed by likes rather than by post date.
The entire point of Twitter was to see what that account is doing right now and not what the most popular thing that account ever did was.
And no. I don't want to login to sort by date and then be tracked by some algorithm so it screws up my random feed like YouTube does when all I want to do is look at a tweet from a news article. Especially when I didn't have to do that before the X changeover. I also don't want it to be a walled garden like Facebook where I have to login to see anything.
The same people who complain about this... (Score:2)
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Are the first, and most vocal, to remind everyone that web sites are private platforms, not free-speech zones, and the operators are entitled to enforce any rules they want within the limits of the law.
Right - and they're doing what they can do, they're leaving the platform - something I'm sure you would suggest were this not an article about them doing exactly that.
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Yeah, Wayland seems to be inevitable (Score:2)
That was actually my thought. It wasn't until I got to the mention of Twitter than I figured out they didn't mean X11.
I did think switching from X11 to Wayland was a funny thing to post publicly about. And a funny thing for /. to pick up.
poor lemmy (Score:2)
It's not like it's hard work (Score:2)
Me too (Score:4, Funny)
Last time I went to X, saw this notice:
Possibly because I liked a joke before Easter in response to Paula White comparing Trump to Jesus saying then crucify him and see if he's still alive on Monday. No clue why. But not being able to doomscroll on X means I spend more time here, so all for the best.
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But... but... the first poster on this article assures us Elon Musk got rid of the cEnSoRsHiP!!!1!!!!
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(shrug)
I too for the opposite reason, having been banned just before musk buyout for saying "we have trannies doing strip shows for children" in a David Axelrod thread.
And no, I won't delete a factually true post just to rescue a shit account.
So long I guess (Score:3)
X still has a massive infosec crowd, we tried bluesky... then mastodon, nothing stuck like X does for us. I hate to see EFF go and it will impact how I donate items for them to auction off and how much I donate in general.
Good development (Score:3)
I recall a EFF staff member used X in a very poisonous way, long before X became poisonous.
No True American Shoud be Using X/Twitter (Score:2)
Nice (Score:2)
Yawn! (Score:2)
Wake me up when EFF condemns X.org and advocates for Wayland
It's not X (Score:2)
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Re:could not be (Score:5, Informative)
Basically the EFF exists to defend pedo rights
You are disturbingly confused and thinking of the (GOP) RetardedKlan Party whose head is a literal 34-time convicted felon, pedophile who admitted in a Howard Stern video to invading locker rooms of underage girls at pageants, and all-around Treasonous Shitrag who wears caked orange makeup to hide his syphilis blemishes.
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admitted in a Howard Stern video to invading locker rooms of underage girls at pageants
As much as it disgusts me to even imply my support of the Orange Blight on Society, I don't think this statement is entirely accurate. From what I understand this particular brag wasn't about a Miss Teen USA Pageant. It was referencing the Miss USA Pageant, which requires the women to be 18+. I only bring this up because I used the same example to prove how much of a colossal creep the POTUS is, and got corrected. So he's not a colossal creep bragging about ogling minors, just a monumental creep bragging
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he and Stern were both making totally inappropriate comments about his own 13 year-old (at the time) daughter being a nice piece of ass.
Again, he's still a monumental piece of shit. My only comment was that the "invading locker rooms of underage girls" was not entirely accurate in the context of the Howard Stern interview. As pointed out below, there are credible accusations that he did so, he just didn't admit it on Stern. I'm not defending the man, I'm just a fan of accuracy. And I don't like being accused of "lying" by his sycophantic defenders.
Re: When you go online, your rights should go with (Score:2, Insightful)
You had enough awareness to post AC because this post is so absurdly dumb, but you still felt compelled to post it anyway. Hmmm. . .
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Musk banned journalists and is shadowbanning posts that use transgender terminology (weirdly calling "cis" derogatory). He's also amplifying far right accounts so they drown out centrist and left wing voices.
Meanwhile Twitter, the social network Musk bought and turned into X, banned:
1. A few people who self identified as Nazis or white supremacists.
2. Hamas
3. People running harassment campaigns or who were otherwise blatantly violating the ToS (and then only after a lot of complaints.)
4. Trump, but only aft
Re:When you go online, your rights should go with (Score:4, Interesting)
Incorrect.
You're referring to the 1st Amendment of US Constitution. That is a subset of freedom of speech. It isn't the entirety of freedom of speech. That is a much broader concept. People and organizations other than the government have the ability to suppress freedom of speech.
You're correct that there is no 1st Amendment protection for non-government people or organizations, and that people can pick and choose the tone and voices on those platforms. But Musk was very much a free speech abolitionist and stated he was one many times. AFAIK, X/Musk hasn't made specific proclamations about what X is today, but when I was last on there right-wing voices were very much being pushed to the top of the algorithm. I wouldn't doubt he's put his thumb on the scale.
If you say as platform is for everyone, and then you suppress the voices from a certain group, you're still censoring and you're just lying about what the platform is.
To be clear I don't know what all X is up to today, I'm just saying your argument defending X is weak.
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The left has become incapable of recognizing it' own authoritarianism or just how far and fast it has moved away from the center. Since 2008, the American right is 2% further to the right, while the Left moved 31% further left. That's far enough from the center to be unable to distinguish it from the far-right. Bill Clinton probably looks like Rush from there now.
I don't give a shit about movement to the right or left, not right now. I just want basic competence and support for the rule of law, because those are the things we've totally lost under the current GOP. A bit of compassion would be good, too. What I wouldn't give to have Dubya back.
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There is no left in America, they moved to the right.
The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.
If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.
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Except none of that actually happened.
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And since they do exist to persuade people, exiting any forum for doing so is a mistake. Especially if is where the people who you need to persuade are found. Preaching to the choir is a poor use of the resources they say they're trying not to waste.
If everybody on X hated the EFF and supported the opposite policies, then X would be the
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Exactly. Nothing stops them from staying on X AND posting elsewhere. They just want attention.
The folks that are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because others *are* permitted to express theirs.