It took a minute — actually a long minute — but Electronic Frontier Foundation has finally shut the door on the platform formerly known as Twitter, without even a “goodbye.”
On Thursday, Electronic Frontier Foundation’s social media and video manager, Kenyatta Thomas, said that the organization won’t be posting on the social platform once known as Twitter, but which was renamed X after it was purchased by enfant terrible Elon Musk in 2022.
It’s not surprising that EFF has decided to drop Twitter. I haven’t posted there since Musk took over (thankfully, about half of my followers followed me to Mastodon), but FOSS Force still posts there, just with less frequency than on other platforms.
What I did find surprising was that Thomas implies in a post on EFF’s website that the organization “expected more” from Musk. Not me. I expected that the platform would quickly disappear under Musk’s guidance, so my surprise is that it’s still around. I’m also a little surprised that it took EFF 3 1/2 years to come to the conclusion that “the math hasn’t worked out for a while now” means that the math isn’t ever going to work out.
I do understand why the EFF folks have been reluctant to leave. At one time it was my favorite website, and only partly because I met David Crosby there and two or three times conversed with him on the platform — which l’il ol’ mortal me thought was pretty cool.
“We posted to Twitter five to ten times a day in 2018,” Thomas wrote. “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.”
Wowie zowie! We’ve noticed a similar loss percentage-wise, but we’ve never seen numbers close to what she’s reporting. Then again, we never had 470,000 followers. I think I remember Steven J. Vaughan‑Nichols reporting a similar drop in impressions, but I can’t find the article. He’s the only open-sourcy news person I can think of who could’ve possibly had that many Twitter followers.
Back in April 2022 — Musk had signed papers to buy Twitter by then, but seemed to be suffering from some sort of buyer’s remorse — EFF published an article outlining the things it saw as being wrong with the platform, which it was hoping that the new owner would fix. On Thursday, Thomas summarized that as:
- Transparent content moderation: Publicly shared policies, clear appeals processes, and renewed commitment to the Santa Clara Principles
- Real security improvements: Including genuine end-to-end encryption for direct messages
- Greater user control: Giving users and third-party developers the means to control the user experience through filters and interoperability.
What! Really? I figure that the only way they really thought that was likely to happen would be if they’d only recently discovered that you can buy weed legally in California, which EFF calls home.
In her article, Thomas not only admits that none of that happened, but also that as flawed as it was, the Twitter they knew was much better than the X they got.
“Twitter was never a utopia. We’ve criticized the platform for about as long as it’s been around,” she said. “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.”
Meanwhile, EFF will still be hanging out and posting on social platforms, including Facebook and TikTok — which she admits aren’t really all that much better than TwitterX. “Our presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok is not an endorsement,” she said. It’s just where the audience is.
The good news is that EFF has a presence on Bluesky and Mastodon, where audiences are a bit more discriminating.
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