Fact check time!

He praised trump for appointing someone into a role who is a big tech sceptic.

Actually, no. See, she spent some time doing that, then left the FTC in 2014 to join the Internet Association, which is a big tech lobby group involving Google/Amazon/Facebook/eBay/etc. She was the vice-president, then later General Consel. While she was there, she helped spearhead the opposition to a California data privacy bill that would have required internet service providers to gasp obtain customer permission to collect and sell their browsing history. So basically, if you cherry pick her early career, sure, she’s skeptical of big tech… but if you actually look closer she pivoted later in life to become a big tech advocate/lobbyist that is strictly against privacy.

However the issue is he then went on to make a broad generalisation about the republicans being the party of fhe people and the democrats being by the party of big business. Someone from proton doubled down on the assertion on social media.

Several people from proton doubled down on that (blatantly and hilariously) false assertion on social media, several times, over several days, at one point even stating that it was Proton’s official stance. (That message was later deleted, and they tried to pretend it never happened, until proof was given. The pretending was then also deleted.

That has caused offence in a era when US politics is extremely polarised and divided. The attitude is “if you’re for the other team, you’re the enemy”. But also people are angry at the company having an apparently right wing political stance.

That’s a very passive voice you have going on there. You could write for US major media with that kind of skill.

The fact is, right now we have a political party that is illegally rummaging through our personal information using unelected goons who literally stormed federal buildings and guerilla-installed unsecured personal servers to siphon off the data. If you think that shouldn’t ‘polarize’ people, especially when the point of gathering that information is to send innocent people to actual literal Guantanamo Bay, you’ve outed yourself. A right wing political stance in the US is, right now, a stance of being against privacy, against rights, and against due process. None of which are things the CEO of a privacy company should be.

Personally I think this is overblown. I think its reasonable to be happy if someone anti big tech is appointed, but the broad sweeping comments about the parties was ill judged. However they have backed away from this position and made clear that proton in politically neutral.

This is a VERY generous interpretation, followed immediately by blatant lies. They never backed away from this position- they doubled down on it over and over again, trying to justify themselves in front of waves of evidence otherwise. When the evidence grew too great, they simply stopped making statements and tried to pretend it didn’t exist and never happened.

As for the absolutely absurd lie that proton is politically neutral, privacy is never politically neutral. Frankly, trying to pretend it’s politically neutral is a giant red flag. While it SHOULD be politically neutral, it is not. A privacy-focused company should very much be in favor of political advancements towards privacy and personal freedoms, which IS a stance.

I see this as bad PR and on the spectrum of someone saying something stupid on twitter and then regretting it, but some people are treating it as an existenial threat for proton and a huge red flag.

If 9 Republicans are at a table talking, and Andy Yen sits down at the table to chat with them, how many Republicans are at the table?

The most sane take on this I’ve heard so far.

I mostly agree with you but:

they have backed away from this position and made clear that proton in politically neutral.

They never backed away from this position. Andy doubled down over and over, even after being brought up to speed by more knowledgeable people. They kept saying “this is not political” despite that very obviously not being the case. Andy may have learned his lesson about staying in his lane though.

I see this as bad PR and on the spectrum of someone saying something stupid on twitter and then regretting it, but some people are treating it as an existenial threat for proton and a huge red flag.

It’s not just “bad PR”, these are the people responsible for the privacy and sovereignty of all of their users. How can they protect you or advocate for anything if they don’t even understand what’s happening?

Some additional context that you left out is that Andy responded from the official Proton account and said “this is our official statement”, defending Andy’s words, then deleted it and said it was NOT an official statement.

My problem is that he didn’t just double-down. He made statements. Didn’t clarify those statements when he continued making statements using the official company reddit account, doubled down using that account, revised his statements when he received backlash, and then when asked specific questions and presented with specific evidence that conflicted with his statement and apparent worldview, he stopped responding.

The company hasn’t made sufficient statements about their political stance or lack there of to divorce themselves from his personal statements, which to me means that he intended those statements to be taken as the company’s view not just his own.

They may or may not see a dip in users from this. But I for one will not be spending the money I was considering spending to move to their services.

but some people are treating it as an existenial threat for proton and a huge red

Agree, Proton is not even American Company. I guess.

I don’t think it’s an immediate threat, but its good to pre-emptively move just in case. I mean, Proton isn’t an Amazon. They are supposed to be a privacy company. You might be able to overlook Jeff Bezos praising a republican, but not when a Privacy company does the same thing. When you claim to be morally superior (like having encryption by default, and privacy), you should be held to a higher standard than the average capitalistic company. Amazon making that statement would be somewhat normal, they are a capitalist corporate for-profit so that’s to be expectwd, a non-profit, human rights group (which is what Proton practically is) making the same statement is just red flag valley.

Same here. He’s not American, why would he care about Trump?

Also we’ve seen this with Twitter. Technology should be neutral in that case and stick to what they sell: security and privacy, but it could go down the toilet very fast.

including using his birth year in his new Reddit nick, when that birth year is also a well-known nazi dogwhistle (88, code for the 8th letter in the alphabet, as in HH, as in “Heil H…”))

Is it true?