> I remember hearing the phrase "that's not an EFF issue" spoken much more frequently in the earlier part of my time at the organization.

I'm not saying that isn't a valid critique, but from 2001 to 2019 so much more of out culture, politics, and protest have shifted to online spaces (for better or worse). Do you think that the EFF just has _more_ to do now because of the shifting needs of our online spaces and the increased governance on them?

I mentioned that interpretation very briefly in my post.

If EFF had continued to be better at political neutrality, I'm sure many observers would have been surprised at times that it declined to take positions on some of the hot issues of the day. That hypothetical reticence could have been interpreted as cowardice or irrelevance, or as saving up political capital to really focus on a smaller number of more fundamental issues.

For example, I have an ill-formed notion that EFF might be more effective in fighting against age verification mandates right now if the organization were seen as less leftist. Among other things, this is because there's one narrative where age verification is something the right wants and the left doesn't. I say "ill-formed" because I haven't been close to this issue and haven't seen exactly how various audiences have parsed it in practice.

The culture war part of this question is how good or bad it is when it's easy for young people to talk to strangers in spaces that aren't overseen by adults (or approved by their parents). I guess forms of this issue are possibly among the most divisive questions in the world.

However, you could also look at questions like online anonymity, privacy, data breaches, competition, ad targeting, decentralization, FOSS, and user control of technology, which are all being impacted by these measures. EFF cares about these things a lot and has cared about them for a long time. I would hypothesize that some of those concerns are now getting dismissed by audiences that think EFF's "true objection" is anti-parental-control and that the other issues are just noise. Again, I haven't been close to this and I'm not positive that this is how it's actually playing out.

To be slightly more (maybe less) fair from an admittedly leftist bias, I think that the example of age verification misses another important component that has been pulled into the culture wars: a lot of age verification laws also target things like sexual education, which in some cases is construed to mean anything that touches on queer identities, even biographies and basic educational material.

The religious right tends to be against all forms of sexual education that aren't based around abstinence and usually want explicit parental involvement, but many on the left feel a basic but complete sexual education is important to educate kids about consent and bodily autonomy, which often helps children recognize things like grooming and assault where other forms of education fail.

Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech. The EFF still needs to navigate these issues to be effective, but I don't think the old coalition holds like it used to.

> Unfortunately that is an emotional topic and quickly gets into an area where classic libertarians (and there doesn't seem to be many left, these days) prioritize parental choice over freedom of speech.

Since I don't live in the USA, I might miss some US-specific political nuances, but I would say that

- I am both for freedom of speech and parental choice

- What I am against is control and surveillance by government and big tech - and this is what the age verification discussion is all about.

So where is the issue that you mention?

You misunderstand my post.

I didn't claim there is actually a conflict between freedom of speech and parental choice. My point is that libertarians in the US have been manipulated by years of propaganda, to the point where they now side with government control of speech under the guise of parental choice, instead of standing on principle for freedom of speech. That is the problem.

This reads to me like you are putting effort into presenting your car is sick a way that satisfies your version of objectively neutral. I wonder if that is at the expense of details, because your claims provide no specifics for us to weigh independently.

As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."

>if the organization were seen as less leftist

I don't understand what you think should happen here. I honestly don't think that the EFF has shifted nearly as much as people have in this hyper partizan environment. The trouble with being "center" is that you get pulled around by the most extreme. The flag is tied to the center of the rope right? If the right pulls away should the EFF compromise their values just to be seen as less leftist?

When being the center is the principle value, you stop being defined by your own values. If you're the flag, you don't get to have a say. One side could hook a tractor up to their end of the rope. The flag has no agency.

Do I think the EFF should have more outreach to the right? Sure. But that outreach can't be: we compromised our principles to chase the moving target loosely defined as "the center" of the moment.

Of course the EFF had more allies on the right during the Obama years. They were suing the Obama administration! There is always going to be a nontrivial amount of tribalism going on. How do you think suing the Trump administration has affected the left? They are eating it up!

No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

It's obvious to me that EFF should sue every administration. I started working at EFF during the first George W. Bush administration, and I worked there throughout that administration, the Obama administration, and the first Trump administration. EFF sued all of them, I worked on all of those cases, and I supported all of those cases.

As you correctly point out, people who liked each of these administrations were often unhappy when we sued them, and often assumed that we were politically biased against them. I always encountered people who effectively said "my party is using power appropriately for good purposes, and you should not question how we use power; that only helps my opponents". Part of the civil liberties framework and something that EFF has done well (including since the time it's become significantly left-leaning) is questioning how every administration uses power.

So, I'm absolutely not suggesting that EFF should praise or celebrate the Trump administration or not sue it.

> No, the EFF should stick to their principles and try to pull people out of their tribalism rather than cater to it. Suing the "your team" administration should not automatically be seen as "look how other team they are!"

I completely agree with this.

That's the thing: They choose leftist allegiances over their ostensible job. For example, search for "twitter files" on the EFF's Twitter account. Nothing. Blatant government effort to censor people. Zip, zilch, nada.

Now they abandon X that's become more free, and head for Bluesky and Mastodon, which are basically recreations of the stifling atmosphere of pre-Musk Twitter.

Freedom for their favoured people to do what they like, perhaps. But for me and others? Nah, not on the program.

Age verification is a great example. We've seen what Alec Muffett has been doing around this and its telling that the EFF is doing basically nothing.

> the way that they think and talk about that work, in terms of what motivates it or what it is meant to achieve, is now a predominantly left-wing framing. If you don't have a left-wing worldview, you're at least not going to be culturally aligned with EFF's take on things, even if you agree with many of their positions and projects.

Is this due to them literally changing their mission and tack, or is this a shifting of the overton window? I would argue the latter, but you have direct experience there so I'm curious to hear more.

My impression is that as EFF's executive leadership has evolved over time, the driving motivations and attitudes of that leadership has changed EFFs style of execution.

It has probably helped increase their raw numbers, but it has also induced "mission drift".

I'd say both of those.

There is a conscious effort to focus more directly and consistently on helping groups that are seen as oppressed.

There was an associated mission statement change sometime around 2015

> The Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all the people of the world.

(The "for all the people of the world" part is doing a lot of work there.)

Reminds me of when I checked the Sierra Club website a year or so ago (I'm a big fan of American National Parks) only to find that their most prioritized element of their "values" was "anti-racism".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/politics/sierra-club-s...

This appears to be part of a greater pattern of semi-bipartisan organizations veering to the left and losing credibility.

Civilized people on the right are also anti-racist. Is anti-racism really a partisan issue to you?

It's only partisan if the other side is racist. And in that case I see no issue with taking the anti-racist side.

I think we can all agree that racism is a bad thing but staunchly declaring "anti-racism" as your priority seems to veer into the territory of consistently finding racism where there is none. It sounds suspiciously like historic witch hunting (and I hate that this term has been recently overused practically to the point of ruination).

How does it seem to do so? Please give me examples.

Racism is a societal ill, so it will express itself through many channels in society, and it will be embedded in the systems that we institute (just like other biases and attitudes do). Therefore identifying racism even when it isn't explicit or flagrant is pretty common and reasonable thing to do.

I don't think I've ever run into anti-racists who are trying to invent issues, or discover racism where there is none.

This comment is exactly the problem. The rhetorical trolling and motte and bailey tactics.

"Anti-racist" is a term associated with extremist identity politics progressives which views all things through the lens of race and gives race primacy in all decisions. Many non-racist people see the anti-racists as being just the mirror image of the racists.

Racism is bad. Being non-racist is good. Declaring your organization to have "anti-racism" as a core focus puts it in the partisan, progressive or "woke" category.

They could say they don't tolerate racism or that they include everyone or they don't discriminate and that would be non partisan and uncontroversial.

If anything is extremist, it's painting "anti-racism" as a partisan activity. That's something I only see far-right politicians do.

Why does the word "anti-racism" trigger this emotion in you? You say you have no issue with a zero tolerance for racism, but for some reason, using the "anti" word makes you upset.

That seems quite extreme to me. They are the same statement. Sure, progressive people moght be more inclined to use "anti-racism" than conservatives, but there's nothing inherently partisan about the phrase.

It seems you have no issue with the contents of anti-racism, but only with the form of it, or perhaps the tone of it.

That is not a good reason to oppose it.

Your original comment is flagged, but as an exercise, think about the following:

Civilized people on the left are also pro-American. Is pro-American really a partisan issue to you?

It's only partisan if the other side is anti-American. And in that case I see no issue with taking the pro-American side.

If anything is extremist, it's painting "pro-American" as a partisan activity. That's something I only see far-left politicians do.

Why does the word "pro-American" trigger this emotion in you? You say you have no issue with a zero tolerance for pro-Americanism, but for some reason, using the "pro" word makes you upset.

That seems quite extreme to me. They are the same statement. Sure, conservative people moght be more inclined to use "pro-America" than progressives, but there's nothing inherently partisan about the phrase.

It seems you have no issue with the contents of pro-American, but only with the form of it, or perhaps the tone of it.

That is not a good reason to oppose it.

Antiracists are as against racism as North Korea is democratic, and the people's, and as much as the Berlin Wall was an anti-fascist protection rampart and totally not a way to stop people from defecting en masse.

Ostensible names are just that, ostensible. They do not always describe reality and are often chosen to mislead. With woke antiracists, that is exactly the case.

I've seen "antiracist" lecturers say kindly silly little things like "white people are born to not being human", an "antiracist" teacher saying white people are born human, but invariably abused by their parents "into whiteness". The torrent of absolutely blatant anti-white racism from these sorts of people is comical in its proportion, and neverending. Their every campaign is "we'll include sparkles everyone sparkles (NOT YOU), so join us at..."

Somehow, it's hard to take the epithet seriously. I wonder why.

Your original comment is flagged, as was mine, but as an exercise, think about the following:

Civilized people on the left are also pro-American. Is pro-American really a partisan issue to you?

It's only partisan if the other side is anti-American. And in that case I see no issue with taking the pro-American side.

If anything is extremist, it's painting "pro-American" as a partisan activity. That's something I only see far-left politicians do.

Why does the word "pro-American" trigger this emotion in you? You say you have no issue with a zero tolerance for pro-Americanism, but for some reason, using the "pro" word makes you upset.

That seems quite extreme to me. They are the same statement. Sure, conservative people moght be more inclined to use "pro-America" than progressives, but there's nothing inherently partisan about the phrase.

It seems you have no issue with the contents of pro-American, but only with the form of it, or perhaps the tone of it.

That is not a good reason to oppose it.

The observation has been called Conquest’s Second Law. It is that common.

I saw this in a comment below yours:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...

I am struggling to see what the issue is.

The detractors here keep vague-posting and it's very pathetic.

Same. I'm not saying OP is doing this at all, but in the last few years a common Conservative refrain has been "why they gotta bring politics into this?" Which seems like a perfectly reasonable complaint on the surface, until one realizes that what they really mean is "I'm offended when mildly confronted with the possibility that my worldview may not be fair to those not like me". Or, "How dare those marginalized groups remind me that they're marginalized?"

I can see that the addition of what may be possible social commentary to the EFF's mission may rub some the wrong way, but I can't see a meaning in which "for all the people of the world" is some coded message for a "woke agenda" or whatever. What about that addendum is political? Should the EFF only support "freedom, justice, and innovation" for some people of the world? For some, the assumption that "no, of course it means all people" is a certain naivety that reminds me of not understanding what "all lives matter" actually means.

Turn on showdead and see all the [flagged] "detractors" posting concisely.

It's depressing now, but also was genuinely amazing how great EFF was early on. I think a lot of that had to do with the board, membership, and staff (such as yourself) intentionally trying to keep things balanced and focused. Thank you for all the great stuff you and the rest of the org did back then.

I hear what you're saying and it's very insightful. But I'm under the impression the libertarians have moved a lot closer to fascism I'm the recent years so it's hard to keep them in any tent. The "society has become more polarized" is an euphemism to describe an important rise of fascism across the world and in the US (that I'm not a citizen of). Yes it's polarized, because there's a side that's trying to create a political police and camps to deport everyone they disagree with as "illegal immigrants".

Circling back to EFF, I have seen many important legal issue related to digital freedom that I thought was important where they were involved. I think they're serving their mission. This decision makes sense, it's just a little bit late

This is part of the political polarization narrative. People are far more quick to throw around the word “fascist” for coalitions that support things like effective policing of crime or immigration controls that would result in a similar level of immigration as the recent past.

You're saying some people want a particular end, and that justifies certain illegal, violent, and discriminatory means.

I'd say those people support authoritarian politics at the least. Now add in the context of the end in question (less immigration of racialized people) and the means in question (indiscriminately imprisoning minorities), that in itself is well in line with fascism.

Right wing libertarians and right itself do not support effective policing of crime. They support more violent and unchecked police force. Those are two different things.

Also, right wing in fact moved toward fascism. It is ok to call them that.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a ducks, shows HH like a duck, strongly pursues fascist policies* like a textbook duck, it might simply be a duck?

*it's really easy, check the dictionary meaning

Not everything is a conspiracy. Hanlon's razor is ruthless here.

I don’t think contemporary American conservative political thought has much in common with an early 20th century European political movement which was never very popular here. To suggest otherwise is ignorant or malicious, and I know on which of those two I am placing my bets.

I trend libertarian because I have a strong anti-authoritarian streak. I used to think of myself as closer to the Republicans, but these days I mostly only agree with the Democrats. Weird times.

Democrats embrace diversity. And diversity is fundamentally against authority.

It was over for me when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet. The EFF had previously been a client of mine so I was somewhat familiar with how things worked and basically once Gilmore was out, it went downhill.

They did a lot of good work (much like the ACLU) but they are now honestly unrecognizable.

My old company donated around $3k/mo of services for almost a decade which in the grand scheme of things isn't a lot but we kept them online when other ISPs would've shut them off.

I've ceased donating to them and the ACLU because they no longer stand for freedom on or off the internet. My money now goes to groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights.

What specific cause are you referring to here as government censorship of the internet?

> when the EFF advanced the charge of government censorship of the internet

Wait, when did this happen? What are you referring to here?

When they supported the legislation called "Net Neutrality" which attempted to supplant the concept of actual net neutrality with some quasi government control of the internet. It would've enabled massive censorship on the internet, something that we've seen is a very very bad thing.

> groups that actively pursue the government for violating our constitutional rights

Could you share some examples?

Yep, great example.

not the ancestor poster, but you might want to check out https://fire.org/ and https://ij.org/

Citations heavily needed.

Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.

The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing

How is this related to the article? It feels like you went way off-topic with a person pet peeve.

It's related, because over 1000 comments here are discussing why they are making such a political move (cloaking it as an audience "reach" issue).

You may want to skim the rest of the comments to understand the issue. The X platform is where many conservatives and centrists reside.

I don't have an issue with EFF wanting to no longer align itself with anyone who is not on the Left, but I prefer they just state that instead.

I dunno man, its seems like you were the one that brought up the political slant. I didn't see politics in that article.

O'Sullivan's First Law:

"All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O%27Sullivan_(columnist)#...

And that is because the right or the left moves further away in the political space? By definition it seems to be the right-wing moving more extreme rather than non right-wing all moving together towards the left.

Entryism. By definition it seems to be the left-wing moving more extreme rather than non left-wing all moving together towards the right. Democrats have shifted more to the left than Republicans to the right: https://archive.is/IILDt

Nah, what right wingers want has stayed remarkably similar over the decades, and many of their stances have in fact become more left-leaning over the years. What has changed is that they're more willing to fight for what they want, and not let the left unilaterally dictate what's respectable. That increased stridency is very real, but their stances and wants haven't become markedly more extreme over time, if anything the opposite.

There's multiple polls and investigations that show that it's the left that has adopted new and more extreme stances and has become less tolerant of dissent from those new goals. eg. Obama's border policy would be unthinkable in today's no human is illegal ideological climate.

That's a good way to put it. When the response to "this shouldn't be politicized" is "everything is political," that misses the point. Digital freedom doesn't need to be left vs right. A lot of powerful lobbying groups don't pick a party and will fight within both parties during primaries instead, for example PhRMA and AIPAC.

Note that EFF is a 501(c)(3) and is not allowed to endorse candidates, unlike other organizational structures. Some groups have multiple entities with different tax classifications, one of which can endorse candidates and one of which can't. EFF doesn't have that.

There is certainly a formula where e.g. single-issue PACs will support candidates of different parties who agree to support their issue. One of my EFF colleagues around 2009 (???) briefly experimented with making a separate PAC organization to lobby on copyright issues by donating to candidates (intentionally both Democrats and Republicans) who would agree to support the PAC's legislative principles. That PAC project only lasted one or two election cycles and I don't specifically remember why; I think the likeliest reason was simply a lack of donors.

A lot of what happened politically in the late 2010s and hit its peak during COVID was that this meme grew that people were thinking and saying things so offensive, we had to make sure they didn’t have a voice on any viable platform.

Oh, yeah, they could still in theory host their own website on Tor Onion, but in practice people would pull whatever domain they had, tell their hosting provider to get these people off of their network, and otherwise try to completely, excuse me, censor what they had to say.

There are two ways to deal with speech we don’t like:

• Do what it takes to bring the speech offline, so no one can read it.

• Respond to the speech with more speech.

Let me give you one example: The manosphere guys. What they believe is that they are learning to somehow become these mysterious “Alpha” guys, they believe the fiction that women only want to sleep with a minority of men, they believe every woman wants to sleep with those relatively few guys, that women will cheat on their partner to sleep with one of those guys, etc.

It’s a pretty misogynistic view of men, in summary.

So, how were they handled in the 2010s? Well, to give one example, one prominent manosphere guy (RooshV) was falsely accuse of advocating for “rape”, his books were pulled from Amazon, hackers attacked his webpage and forum to try and push him offline, forcing him to get a DDos-resistant Cloudflare account, etc. He was kicked off of Twitter. The UK blacklisted him so he is not allowed to travel there; Australia too.

It caused his followers to feel like they were being attacked by “Women and betas”, causing them to further the spread of their beliefs and them continuing to believe they were a persecuted minority.

The lies they believe: That women only want to date and sleep with a few “Alpha” men, that women will cheat on their partner if he is a “Beta provider”, and what not are still memes being widely spread online.

The attempts to censor those ideas didn’t work. They just made the idea stronger when everything was said and done.

What I am doing, however, is spreading facts and information countering their misogynistic lies. [1] Because I agree with Gilmore: The answer to speech we don’t like is more speech.

Point being, insomuch as the EFF feels one should deal with speech one doesn’t like with censorship, instead of more speech, they are no longer following their original ideals.

[1] https://nuancepill.substack.com/ is spreading the good word.

I also heard the slogan "the answer to bad speech is more speech" frequently inside EFF in the first half of my time working there and almost never in the second half.

It's actually a conceptually challenging question for me to try to account for why that changed. I would like to go off and ponder that a bit.

I should also emphasize that EFF has never advocated for narrowing what is protected speech under the first amendment. Even when people stopped habitually saying "the answer to bad speech is more speech", they didn't somehow start saying "the answer to bad speech is making it illegal".

I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation. I remember in college (1997) someone had a poster based on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking" with the quote that they use from Stephen Hawking:

  It doesn't have to be like this
  All we need to do is make sure we keep talking

I can't really imagine a college student in 2026 having that poster (regardless of that student's political views).

I think the problem with the free speech ideals is a combination of engagement farms (i.e. a room full of smart phones where people “like” or view particular content so it artificially becomes more popular on social media) and bots (which, with modern AI, are pretty hard to distinguish from people who know how to write) which make modern online content a lot less organic.

In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.

Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.

Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.

[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.

First off, just want to say thanks so much for posting your top comment - I'm only tangentially familiar with the changes to the EFF over the years so I appreciate the insight.

> I think there was a relatively rapid shift in many parts of American society around 2012 away from optimism about the potential of debate, discussion, and conversation.

I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one (small data point to think about - the reddit r/jailbait controversy was in 2011, and that was when, AFAICT, Reddit first implemented policies beyond "anything except outright illegal speech". I also remember that, regardless of ones opinion on the topic, Reddit didn't really have a choice in the matter - they would have been sued or legislated out of existence if they didn't ban r/jailbait and similar subreddit. I also have trouble believing either the "old" ACLU or EFF would have defended the r/jailbaiters, but you were there at the time so maybe you could offer insight).

But I'd argue that this isn't just some opinion change. One of the unstated beliefs of many who believed in the power of free speech is basically that when people are free to speak out, the "best" ideas, or at least the factually true ideas, win out. I don't know how you could be alive on this planet for the past 15 years and still believe that.

To take a relatively non-political example, look at Ann Reardon, a YouTuber who originally got big with a baking channel but switched to "food debunking videos" because there was so much food bullshit online, and worst, "food porn" makers were hawking cheap, bright videos of recipes online that were inherently impossible while real amazing bakers (who showed recipes that actually, truthfully worked) were having to leave YouTube because their views plummeted in the face of "So Yummy" and the like.

Similarly, take the rise of MAHA, which has now mainstreamed pseudoscience and rejected evidence-based policies. Fine, one could argue there is a lot of opinion baked into that statement, but in a lot of cases some MAHA pronouncements make no sense because they're not even self-consistent. Like the new nutrition guidelines literally say "When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil." Except olive oil, despite being a great choice for many people because it is high in oleic acid, is actually a very poor source of essential fatty acids. There are lots of other BS items I could bring up with respect to MAHA, that's just one that is so undeniably clear that the authors didn't know what they were talking about.

To emphasize, I think the rise on the left of "you're a bad person if you say the wrong things as we define them" is not just a horrible, but ultimately extremely counterproductive, approach. I myself have very little idea what the optimal solution is, but I think technology, with its algorithmic feeds and difficulty that it presents differentiating bots from humans, has fundamentally changed a lot of the "axioms" people assumed with free speech absolutism, and to deny that feels like sticking one's head in the sand.

Because of the asymmetry of energy required to refute bullshit, letting people spew bullshit and cleaning up afterwards is very expensive. And because some people are very bad at updating information in their heads (worse than the average, which is already poor), people will be told a refutation, agree, and later will forget, and repeat the refuted bullshit. And I truly believe they forget, not just pretend to agree with the refutation.

So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.

But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.

People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".

Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.

Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.

Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.

A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.

Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.

>>>Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.<<<

This is a common meme which has gone viral on social media, but it’s actually not true. Read this:

https://archive.ph/20250801101301/https://nuancepill.substac...

“Men outnumber women on dating apps about 3:1. When adjusting for this imbalance, the median match rate for men and women on Tinder evens out, meaning the average woman isn’t matching with a bunch of chads.”

Also read this:

https://archive.ph/20251223030351/https://nuancepill.substac...

“The viral graph showing most couples in the US meeting online is based on a pitifully small sample size. The true percentage of people meeting online is likely in the range of 25–30%.”

> left-wing framing

The problems with claiming something is "left-wing", is that without a definition or clear example, the claim becomes highly suspect or appears very subjective.

Yet another problem, in terms of perspective, is seeing anything not right-wing as being "left-wing". The issue with that, however, is there is a very large middle. Neither predominately left or right, independents or switchers, whose opinions depend on the issue being discussed.