> I thought EFF would be his thing too, no?

Musk is a freedom of speech absolutist when it comes to the things he has to say. ‘I think that the bedrock of democracy is freedom of speech’ [1].

He has rather different views when it’s anyone else speaking [2].

[1] https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/tom-oloha...

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...

That may be the case, but the EFF’s Twitter alone is enough to explain their poor performance.

Their last post did quite well, and it is characteristically different from their other posts.

I don’t think Elon Musk personally needs to put his thumb on the scale in this case. I don’t even understand why he’d be involved here and not say anything. Like wouldn’t he say “EFF sucks” or something? I dunno, I don’t really keep up with that kind of thing.

It’s fine if the EFF wants to leave because they aren’t reaching people.

On a decent social platform, it shouldn't even matter if their posting sucks or is lazy. If I followed them, I want to see their stuff. If I'm not seeing the posts of the accounts I follow, the site is not worth me using - same if ppl who explicitly followed me aren't seeing my posts.

> I don’t think Elon Musk personally has to put his finger on any scale. I thought EFF would be his thing too, no?

Not sure why you would say that, I know he’s branded himself as a tech guy but beyond that nothing about the EFF seems to match his values.

The EFF tried to sue him last year too: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/judge-rejects-governments...

Maybe, I haven’t been keeping up since the cracker machine stuff. I thought EFF was a GNU-adjacent thing any generic tech person supported. I guess I was wrong.

The GNU-adjacent thing would be FSF, and I'd say many EFF supporters are antagonistic towards the FSF (and/or RMS) because of their "extremist" stances. I'd characterize EFF as "corporate Open Source" vs. FSF/GNU "Free Software."