We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Amid reports that X—the site formerly known as Twitter—is dropping in value, hindering how people use the site, and engaging in controversial account removals, it has never been more precarious to rely on the site as a historical record. So, it’s important for individuals to act now and save what they can. While your tweets may feel ephemeral or inconsequential, they are part of a greater history in danger of being wiped out.

Any centralized communication platform, particularly one operated for profit, is vulnerable to being coopted by the powerful. This might mean exploiting users to maximize short-term profits or changing moderation rules to silence marginalized people and promote hate speech. The past year has seen unprecedented numbers of users fleeing X, Reddit, and other platforms over changes in policy. 

But leaving these platforms, whether in protest, disgust, or boredom, leaves behind an important digital record of how communities come together and grow.

Archiving tweets isn’t just for Dril and former presidents. In its heyday, Twitter was an essential platform for activists, organizers, journalists, and other everyday people around the world to speak truth to power and fight for social justice. Its importance for movements and building community was noted by oppressive governments around the world, forcing the site to ward off data requests and authoritarian speech suppression. 

A prominent example in the U.S. is the movement for Black Lives, where activists built momentum on the site and found effective strategies to bring global attention to their protests. Already though, #BlackLivesMatter tweets from 2014 are vanishing from X, and the site seems to be blocking and disabling  tools from archivists preserving this history.

In documenting social movements we must remember social media is not an archive, and platforms will only store (and gate keep) user work insofar as it's profitable, just as they only make it accessible to the public when it is profitable to do so. But when platforms fail, with them goes the history of everyday voices speaking to power, the very voices organizations like EFF fought to protect. The voice of power, in contrast, remains well documented.

In the battleground of history, archival work is cultural defense. Luckily, digital media can be quickly and cheaply duplicated and shared. In just a few minutes of your time, the following easy steps will help preserve not just your history, but the history of your community and the voices you supported.

1. Request Your Archive

Despite the many new restrictions on Twitter access, the site still allows users to backup their entire profile in just a few clicks.

• First, in your browser or the X app, navigate to Settings. This will look like three dots, and may say "More" on the sidebar.

• Select Settings and Privacy, then Your Account, if it is not already open.

• Here, click Download an archive of your data

• You'll be prompted to sign into your account again, and X will need to send a verification code to your email or text message. Verifying with email may be more reliable, particularly for users outside of the US.

• Select Request archive

• Finally—wait. This process can take a few days, but you will receive an email once it is complete. Eventually you will get an email saying that your archive is ready. Follow that link while logged in and download the ZIP files.

2. Optionally, Share with a Library or Archive.

There are many libraries, archives, and community groups who would be interested in preserving these archives. You may want to reach out to a librarian to help find one curating a collection specific to your community.

You can also request that your archive be preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. While these steps are specific to the Internet Archive. We recommend using a desktop computer or laptop, rather than a mobile device.

• Unpack the ZIP file you downloaded in the previous section.
• In the Data folder, select the tweets.js file. This is a JSON file with just your tweets. JSON files are difficult to read, but you can convert it to a CSV file and view them in a spreadsheet program like Excel or LibreOffice Calc as a free alternative.
• Converting to CSV can be done locally with open source tools, but Wayback Machine's tool makes it easy to do from the browser. You'll need to have or sign up for an archive.org account, as well as a Google account.
• With your accounts and tweets.js file ready, go to the Save Page Now's Google Sheet Interface and select "Archive all your Tweets with the Wayback Machine.”

• Fill in your Twitter handle, select your "tweets.js" file from Step 2 and click "Upload."

• After some processing, you will be able to download the CSV file.
• Import this CSV to a new Google Sheet. All of this information is already public on Twitter, but if you notice very sensitive content, you can remove those lines. Otherwise it is best to leave this information untampered.
• Then, use Save Page Now's Google Sheet Interface again to archive from the sheet made in the previous step.
• It may take hours or days for this request to fully process, but once it is complete you will get an email with the results.
• Finally, The Wayback Machine will give you the option to also preserve all of your outlinks as well. This is a way to archive all the website URLs you shared on Twitter. This is an easy way to further preserve the messages you've promoted over the years.

3. Personal Backup Plan

Now that you have a ZIP file with all of your Twitter data, including public and private information, you may want to have a security plan on how to handle this information. This plan will differ for everyone, but these are a few steps to consider.

If you only wish to preserve the public information you already successfully shared with an archive, you can delete the archive. For anything you would like to keep but may be sensitive, you may want to use a tool to encrypt the file and keep it on a secure device.

Finally, even if this information is not sensitive, you'll want to be sure you have a solid backup plan. If you are still using Twitter, this means deciding on a schedule to repeat this process so your archive is up to date. Otherwise, you'll want to keep a few copies of the file across several devices. If you already have a plan for backing up your PC, this may not be necessary.

4. Closing Your Account

Finally, you'll want to consider what to do with your current Twitter account now that all your data is backed up and secure.

(If you are planning on leaving X, make sure to follow EFF on Mastodon, Bluesky or another platform.)

Since you have a backup, it may be a good idea to request data be deleted on the site. You can try to delete just the most sensitive information, like your account DMs, but there's no guarantee Twitter will honor these requests—or that it's even capable of honoring such requests. Even EU citizens covered by the GDPR will need to request the deletion of their entire account.

If you aren’t concerned about Twitter keeping this information, however, there is some value in keeping your old account up. Holding the username can prevent impersonators, and listing your new social media account will help people on the site find you elsewhere. In our guide for joining mastodon we recommended sharing your new account in several places. However, adding the new account to one's Twitter name will have the best visibility across search engines, screenshots, or alternative front ends like nitter.

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

The video game industry is undergoing the same concerning changes we’ve seen before with film and TV, and it underscores the need for meaningful digital ownership.

Twenty years ago you owned DVDs. Ten years ago you probably had a Netflix subscription with a seemingly endless library. Now, you probably have two to three subscription services, and regularly hear about shows and movies you can no longer access, either because they’ve moved to yet another subscription service, or because platforms are delisting them all together.

The video game industry is getting the same treatment. While it is still common for people to purchase physical or digital copies of games, albeit often from within walled gardens like Steam or Epic Games, game subscriptions are becoming more and more common. Like the early days of movie streaming, services like Microsoft Game Pass or PlayStation Plus seem to offer a good deal. For a flat monthly fee, you have access to seemingly unlimited game choices. That is, for now.

In a recent announcement from game developer Ubisoft, their director of subscriptions said plainly that a goal of their subscription service’s rebranding is to get players “comfortable” with not owning their games. Notably, this is from a company which had developed five non-mobile games last year, hoping users will access them and older games through a $17.99 per month subscription; that is, $215.88 per year. And after a year, how many games does the end user actually own? None. 

This fragmentation of the video game subscription market isn’t just driven by greed, but answering a real frustration from users the industry itself has created. Gamers at one point could easily buy and return games, they could rent games they were only curious about, and even recoup costs by reselling their game. With the proliferation of DRM and walled-garden game vendors, ownership rights have been eroded. Reselling or giving away a copy of your game, or leaving it for your next of kin, is no longer permitted. The closest thing to a rental now available is a game demo (if it exists) or playing a game within the time frame necessary to get a refund (if a storefront offers one). These purchases are also put at risk as games are sometimes released incomplete beyond this time limit. Developers such as Ubisoft will also shut down online services which severely impact the features of these games, or even make them unplayable.

DRM and tightly controlled gaming platforms also make it harder to mod or tweak games in ways the platform doesn’t choose to support. Mods are a thriving medium for extending the functionalities, messages, and experiences facilitated by a base game, one where passion has driven contributors to design amazing things with a low barrier to entry. Mods depend on users who have the necessary access to a work to understand how to mod it and to deploy mods when running the program. A model wherein the player can only access these aspects of the game in the ways the manufacturer supports undermines the creative rights of owners as well.

This shift should raise alarms for both users and creators alike. With publishers serving as intermediaries, game developers are left either struggling to reach their audience, or settling for a fraction of the revenue they could receive from traditional sales. 

We need to preserve digital ownership before we see video games fall into the same cycles as film and TV, with users stuck paying more and receiving not robust ownership, but fragile access on the platform’s terms.

When a system becomes too tightly-controlled and centralized, the people being squeezed tend to push back to reclaim their lost autonomy. The internet is no exception. While the internet began as a loose affiliation of universities and government bodies, that emergent digital commons has been increasingly privatized and consolidated into a handful of walled gardens. Their names are too often made synonymous with the internet, as they fight for the data and eyeballs of their users.

In the past few years, there's been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.

This momentum wasn’t only seen in the growth of new social media projects. Other exciting projects have emerged this year, and public policy is adapting.  

Major gains for the Federated Social Web

After Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) at the end of 2022,  many people moved to various corners of the “IndieWeb” at an unprecedented rate. It turns out those were just the cracks before the dam burst this year. 2023 was defined as much by the ascent of federated microblogging as it was by the descent of X as a platform. These users didn't just want a drop-in replacement for twitter, they wanted to break the major social media platform model for good by forcing hosts to compete on service and respect.

The other major development in the fediverse came from a seemingly unlikely source—Meta.

This momentum at the start of the year was principally seen in the fediverse, with Mastodon. This software project filled the microblogging niche for users leaving Twitter, while conveniently being one of the most mature projects using the ActivityPub protocol, the basic building block at the heart of interoperability in the many fediverse services.

Filling a similar niche, but built on the privately developed Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol, Bluesky also saw rapid growth despite remaining invite-only and not-yet being open to interoperating until next year. Projects like Bridgy Fed are already working to connect Bluesky to the broader federated ecosystem, and show some promise of a future where we don’t have to choose between using the tools and sites we prefer and connecting to friends, family, and many others. 

The other major development in the fediverse came from a seemingly unlikely source—Meta.  Meta owns Facebook and Instagram, which have gone to great lengths to control user data—even invoking privacy-washing claims to maintain their walled gardens. So Meta’s launch of Threads in July, a new microblogging site using the fediverse’s ActivityPub protocol, was surprising. After an initial break-out success, thanks to bringing Instagram users into the new service, Threads is already many times larger than the fediverse and Bluesky combined. While such a large site could mean federated microblogging joins federated direct messages (email) in the mainstream, Threads has not yet interoperated, and may create a rift among hosts and users wary of Meta’s poor track record in protecting user privacy and content moderation. 

We also saw the federation of social news aggregation. In June, Reddit outraged its moderators and third party developers by updating its API pricing policy to become less interoperable. This outrage manifested into a major platform-wide blackout protesting the changes and the unfair treatment of the unpaid and passionate volunteers who make the site worthwhile. Again, users turned to the maturing fediverse as a decentralized refuge, specifically the more reddit-like cousins of Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. Reddit, echoing Twitter once again, also came under fire for briefly banning users and subreddits related to these fediverse alternatives. While the protests continued well beyond their initial scope, and continued to remain in the public eye, order was eventually restored. However, the formerly fringe alternatives in the fediverse continue to be active and improving.

Some of our friends are hard at work figuring out what comes next.

Finally, while these projects made great strides in gaining adoption and improving usability, many remain generally small and under-resourced. For the decentralized social web to succeed, it must be sustainable and maintain high standards for how users are treated and safeguarded. These indie hosts face similar liability risks and governmental threats as the billion dollar companies. In a harrowing example we saw this year, an FBI raid on a Mastodon server admin for unrelated reasons resulted in the seizure of an unencrypted server database. It’s a situation that echoes EFF’s founding case over 30 years ago, Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, and it underlines the need for small hosts to be prepared to guard against government overreach.

With so much momentum towards better tools and a wider adoption of better standards, we remain optimistic about the future of these federated projects.

Innovative Peer-to-Peer Apps

This year has also seen continued work on components of the web that live further down the stack, in the form of protocols and libraries that most people never interact with but which enable the decentralized services that users rely on every day. The ActivityPub protocol, for example, describes how all the servers that make up the fediverse communicate with each other. ActivityPub opened up a world of federated decentralized social media—but progress isn't stopping there.

Some of our friends are hard at work figuring out what comes next. The Veilid project was officially released in August, at DEFCON, and the Spritely project has been throwing out impressive news and releases all year long. Both projects promise to revolutionize how we can exchange data directly from person to person, securely and privately, and without needing intermediaries. As we wrote, we’re looking forward to seeing where they lead us in the coming year.

The European Union’s Digital Markets Act went into effect in May of 2023, and one of its provisions requires that messaging platforms greater than a certain size must interoperate with other competitors. While each service with obligations under the DMA could offer its own bespoke API to satisfy the law’s requirements, the better result for both competition and users would be the creation of a common protocol for cross-platform messaging that is open, relatively easy to implement, and, crucially, maintains end-to-end encryption for the protection of end users. Fortunately, the More Instant Messaging Interoperability (MIMI) working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has taken up that exact challenge. We’ve been keeping tabs on the group and are optimistic about the possibility of open interoperability that promotes competition and decentralization while protecting privacy.

EFF on DWeb Policy

DWeb Camp 2023

The “star-studded gala” (such as it is) of the decentralized web, DWeb Camp, took place this year among the redwoods of Northern California over a weekend in late June. EFF participated in a number of panels focused on the policy implications of decentralization, how to influence policy makers, and the future direction of the decentralized web movement. The opportunity to connect with others working on both policy and engineering was invaluable, as were the contributions from those living outside the US and Europe.  

Blockchain Testimony

Blockchains have been the focus of plenty of legislators and regulators in the past handful of years, but most of the focus has been on the financial uses and implications of the tool. EFF had a welcome opportunity to direct attention toward the less-often discussed other potential uses of blockchains when we were invited to testify before the United States House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce. The hearing focused specifically on non-financial uses of blockchains, and our testimony attempted to cut through the hype to help members of Congress understand what it is and how and when it can be helpful while being clear about its potential downsides. 

The overarching message of our testimony was that blockchain at the end of the day is just a tool and, just as with other tools, Congress should refrain from regulating it specifically because of what it is. The other important point we made was that the individuals that contribute open source code to blockchain projects should not, absent some other factor, be the ones held responsible for what others do with the code they write.

A decentralized system means that individuals can “shop” for the moderation style that best suits their preferences.

Moderation in Decentralized Social Media

One of the major issues brought to light by the rise of decentralized social media such as Bluesky and the fediverse this year has been the promises and complications of content moderation in a decentralized space. On centralized social media, content moderation can seem more straightforward. The moderation team has broad insight into the whole network, and, for the major platforms most people are used to, these centralized services have more resources to maintain a team of moderators. Decentralized social media has its own benefits when it comes to moderation, however. For example, a decentralized system means that individuals can “shop” for the moderation style that best suits their preferences. This community-level moderation may scale better than centralized models, as moderators have more context and personal investment in the space

But decentralized moderation is certainly not a solved problem, which is why the Atlantic Council created the Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. The Task Force started out by compiling a comprehensive report on the state of trust and safety work in social media and the upcoming challenges in the space. They then conducted a series of public and private consultations focused on the challenges of content moderation in these new platforms. Experts from many related fields were invited to participate, including EFF, and we were excited to offer our thoughts and to hear from the other assembled groups. The Task Force is compiling a final report that will synthesize the feedback and which should be out early next year.

The past year has been a strong one for the decentralization movement. More and more people are realizing that the large centralized services are not all there is to the internet, and exploration of alternatives is happening at a level that we haven’t seen in at least a decade. New services, protocols, and governance models are also popping up all the time. Throughout the year we have tried to guide newcomers through the differences in decentralized services, inform public policies surrounding these technologies and tools, and help envision where the movement should grow next. We’re looking forward to continuing to do so in 2024.

This blog is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2023.