EFF is leaving X

Summary

After almost twenty years on the platform, EFF is logging off of X. This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue. The math hasn’t worked out for a while now. The Numbers Aren’t Working Out 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. We Expected More When Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, EFF was clear about what needed fixing. We called for: 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. 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. "But You're Still on Facebook and TikTok?" Yes. And we understand why that looks contradictory. Let us explain. EFF exists to protect people’s digital rights. Not just the people who already value our work, have opted out of surveillance, or have already migrated to the fediverse. The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. Young people, peopl...