Privacy

Basically one of the founders, Andy, posted on twitter some praise of Donald Trump and the US Republicans party. I didn’t love but it wasn’t so exactly horrible IMO. But as people replied, Andy started answering via Proton’s official twitter account. And these were much worse.

Unfortunately, the original posts are now deleted. Even the discussions that I participated in here on Lemmy are now deleted. So it’s definitely hard to share much info. Here’s a copy/pasta of something from my inbox:

The worst part was not Andy's initial posts it was his initial "let me correct the narrative" follow ups where he went on to bash Democrats and call the Republicans the party of the little guy, which is in many ways untruthful.

It's just a really bad look overall. This is basically how it started with us finding out Musk was such a mess too.

Here’s Proton’s official response on Reddit, from 6 months ago. If you care to dig up more info, this should be a good starting point. Maybe the original posts are available on archive.org?

For my purposes, the event prompted me to learn a tad more about Proton’s finances. I discovered that the company donates to political parties in the US and elsewhere. IMO, this kind of thing gives people a good reason to care about this kind of “internet drama” because Proton uses its revenue to influence politics. I don’t know any details of how they do so, but this event made me question if I should continue using their services.