X says door is open to talks after EFF quits the platform

The Electronic Frontier Foundation became the latest organization to walk away from X, announcing yesterday that it was logging off after nearly 20 years on the platform. This time around, however, X isn’t ignoring the exit.

James Burnham, who serves as general counsel at X and xAI, replied publicly on the platform, saying the decision “does not make sense” for a digital rights nonprofit to leave what he called “the only platform that is fundamentally committed to free speech.”

He also said EFF’s explanation “does not explain” the departure, and extended an open invitation saying: “You’re welcome to call us if you’d like to discuss.”

EFF’s case was built around numbers. In 2018, its posts were pulling 50 to 100 million impressions a month. By 2024, 2,500 posts were generating around 2 million impressions monthly. Last year, 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,” wrote EFF’s social media manager Kenyatta Thomas.

There’s no doubt that the drop in numbers is real. Whether it’s unique to X is a fair question, though.

From what I could find, EFF’s numbers on Bluesky don’t appear to be dramatically better, and Mastodon seems even lower. So the reach argument, while not wrong, may not be the full picture. At the moment, it seems more like a values-based exit than one that the stats are being used to justify.

Even X’s product head, Nikita Bier, highlighted the same. In a post, Bier said, whoever advised the move “should be fired.” His reasoning: EFF’s reach on X is 13.3x larger than on Instagram and 228x larger than on TikTok, two platforms it’s staying on.

“If they want their foundation to have an impact on the global conversation, the only place is on X,” he wrote.

EFF’s own impressions data for the last 30 days shows X pulling well over a million total views, with Instagram and TikTok not even close. So the reach argument, while not wrong about X declining over the years, cuts both ways.

That said, EFF also cited structural changes under Musk, including the disbanding of the platform’s human rights team and layoffs in regions where the company had previously pushed back against government censorship demands.

As for why the EFF is still on TikTok and Facebook? They explained that their audience lives on those platforms, and simply abandoning them would mean abandoning the people who need digital rights information most. It’s a reasonable argument, even if it invites some skepticism.

The biggest irony amid all this is that the EFF has limited the comments on the exit post. For an organization whose whole purpose is to defend privacy AND free speech, as highlighted front and center on the official website, this move alone has a lot of people talking.

EFF is far from the first high-profile name to leave. News publishers, academics, celebrities, and local governments have all made similar exits since Musk’s 2022 takeover.

Whether EFF actually takes Burnham up on that phone call is another thing entirely.

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