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Paul Cantrell

A chronic problem with nonprofits and advocacy orgs is that they can become so hyper-focused on the world as viewed through the narrow lens of their mission — noble though the mission may be — that they start to lose context, perspective, and common sense. And then they start doing stupid crap, stepping on fingers and walking into walls.

I think this has happened to the @eff.
mastodon.social/@eff/113801429

MastodonElectronic Frontier Foundation (@eff@mastodon.social)By the time we shared this statement, the conversation had understandably shifted toward Meta's dangerous new content policy. It was a mistake to project good faith onto the company, which quickly showed it was not deserving of it. For a full analysis, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free

To be fair, I at least applaud the self-correction here. Other orgs could learn something about how to say “oops” when they fuck up and coddle somebody / something horrible because the horrible thing appeared to resemble the org’s mission for two seconds.

Still, this was an embarrassing unforced error on the EFF’s part. They should have known better.

@inthehands @eff That's a very generous interpretation. I think they have a few cryptofash insiders or influential donors they're taking direction from.

@dalias @eff

Oh, I’m highly confident that they always have awful people trying to whisper garbage in their ear. What I described in my post is how those voices get in the door; a well-anchored organization is resilient to that exposure. And a poorly anchored org…well, it lets them take over — as with the ADL for example.

@inthehands @eff A lot of this is a holdover from old times when there were arguably 2+ legitimate political sides and libertarianism hadn't been debunked as a front for fascism.

Now there are clearly only two sides: fascism and antifa(scism).

@inthehands while that update is an improvement, and maybe better than some other orgs, I wouldn’t go so far as to applaud. I can’t quantify how much the bad post decreased my perception of how much good they do, this followup has increased it from there but not as far as back to where it was

@ShadSterling
It’s hardly the first time they’ve screwed up this sort of thing either.

@inthehands @eff 100% this! I’m a longtime supporter of both EFF and ACLU and they both have fallen into this trap, but are still a net positive

@grwster

I feel like the ACLU has actually pulled out of it somewhat over the last decade, while the EFF has gotten worse. But maybe that’s just what I’ve happened to hear about and not hear about.

@inthehands They’ve always been like that. Decades ago they were advocating that spam filtering is inherently unethical, and that every piece of spam must be delivered to its intended recipient.