I disagree with the EFF here too but I am so happy that there is a good faith well reasoned argument on the other side. This struggle is what makes democracy work.
I feel it is a very strange hill to die on for them, given all the good they can do in other places. I'm kind of doubting my annual donation to them around the first of the year which I've done for at least 10 years, but nothing is ever gonna be 100%, but I might look at other similar orgs in the future for my $
Well at least you can agree with both the state, and as it were at this point, the scary foreign state, on this one.. Probably worth more dollars to donuts to be on those sides anyway!
Yeah this is a weird one where their m.o. on privacy/security are at odds with their first amendment side of things...sounds like the latter won out. I also disagree with them on this. This isn't something like net neutrality. It's one of many privately-owned social media platforms and one such with deeply privacy-invasive software that has adversarial foreign ties against the US.
There’s a simple, obvious and overwhelmingly popular solution to this problem that respects free speech and privacy. Unlike the current law, it wouldn’t blatantly violate the constitution by targeting a specific group:
Apply reasonable privacy and transparency rules to all social media platforms, regardless of ownership.
I’m not sure the EFF really needs to spell it out at this point.
The fact that only one app is being banned makes it pretty obvious that privacy concerns are orthogonal to the political shift this represents. The law was originally passed before the Gaza ceasefire, and the activism on the app relating to that issue was the specific example that was blamed on Chinese influence. The hypothesis was that teenagers would not know or care about US policy towards the conflict if a foreign communication service was not facilitating the spread of relevant information.
