Tech Wiz

The @EFF is abandoning X because they say views of their posts have fallen from more than 500 million in 2018 to around 10 million last year. They imply that they are being throttled by the platform. What they aren’t telling you is that their 2018 era impressions were massively boosted artificially by backend algorithmic policies that pushed their content into the feeds of millions of users who didn’t read or care about it. I looked at @EFF tweets from December of 2018 and their engagement during that period was anemic. Most of their tweets had fewer than 50 likes, and single digit numbers of replies and retweets. On average, they were getting fewer than 500 likes and retweets per day on between 1.5 and 3 million impressions. That is extremely low. This does not suggest people were actively looking for or engaging with @eff content — instead it suggests that the old algorithm was strongly amplifying content from this account — either because it was a blue-check organization with a lot of followers or because Twitter was amplifying tweets from activist organizations during that period. But the people being shown these tweets were ignoring them. I also looked at their page on Bsky, and, while their most recent posts there were slightly elevated by their post announcing that they have flounced from X, most of their posts more than a few days old get fewer 50 likes on that platform.