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.

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"Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper," writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. "That's effectively what's begun happening online in the last few months." The Internet Archive — the world's largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s... But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web's traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit... The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several — including the Times — are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There's a strong case that such training is fair use. Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for. If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren't just limiting bots. They're erasing the historical record... Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established... There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake.

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A digital privacy group is suing the federal government to obtain records of its communications with technology and social media companies leading up to the removal of several apps and websites that were tracking the activities of  Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agencies.  

In a lawsuit filed Thursday, the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation names four federal agencies (The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and component agencies ICE and Customs and Border Patrol) as defendants, seeking their communications with Meta, Apple and Google. 

The conversations concern the removal of apps like ICEBlock, Red Dot and DeICER from  their respective stores, as well as the removal of websites like ICE Sightings-Chicagoland, which provide real-time online tracking of federal immigration raids.

“The government’s actions are the subject of intense media attention and raise important legal questions,” EFF stated in its complaint. “Documenting law enforcement activities occurring in public and disseminating that information to the broader public is protected First Amendment activity.”

The lawsuit states that Apple removed ICEBlock on Oct. 2 partly because of information it had received from “law enforcement.” Apple officials also cited Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said that Justice “reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App store – and Apple did so.”

Similar actions, like Meta’s Oct. 14 takedown of a website focused on ICE raids in Chicago, were also confirmed to be at the behest of the government, according to public statements on X by Bondi and other U.S. officials.

EFF argued that these activities clearly fall under free speech and seek records on what kind of conversations these agencies were having with private companies and whether they crossed the line into jawboning.

“Government officials’ coercion to restrict the First Amendment activities of a private party such as a law enforcement tracking application or website can violate the First Amendment,” the complaint stated. “The nature and content of the Defendants’ communications with these technology companies is thus critical for determining whether they crossed the line from governmental cajoling to unconstitutional coercion.”

Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and the GOP made the Biden administration’s conversations with social media companies the centerpiece in a broader argument that the administration  was violating the free speech rights of Americans.

Google told the House Judiciary Committee this year that it felt pressured by the government to censor certain viewpoints. However, Google and other social media companies have described the exchanges in court cases as entirely voluntary and limited to sharing information about accounts spreading misinformation on COVID-19 and elections. Last year, the Supreme Court found these exchanges were voluntary and that companies could refuse the government’s requests without facing consequences.  

On his first day re-entering office, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” that prevented federal agencies from using time, money or resources on activity that “engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

EFF filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act at all four agencies, asking for expedited processing due to “the urgency to inform the public about potential coercion of technology platforms and because it is a matter of exceptional media interest that raises questions about the agencies’ integrity.” None have responded with the records.

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