Perhaps 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.
The 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.
> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
Nothing 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.
An 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.
MAGA is the one who decided ideas like freedom of expression, an expectation of privacy, and holding governments accountable were woke liberal concepts.
Maybe 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.
> 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.
Looking very quickly at some of the votes being tracked, I don't see any vote that remotely qualifies as supporting or opposing free speech. Instead, they're focusing on things like "do you oppose the Federal Reserve making interest payments?" "do you oppose cryptocurrency regulations?" "do you oppose energy efficiency regulations for appliances?"
You cannot be serious. Looking at the 'Freedom Index', I can see them approving of things like restricting abortion, giving the executive even more power and more.
The 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.
I 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.
I 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?
yes 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.
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.