He should not have @'d Trump. By doing this he is explicitly calling for the incoming administration’s attention and signalling he’s willing to play ball and bend the knee. Also nice try at obfuscation saying the tweet was from last year, jackass.
Additionally the company account doubled down on his messaging. I think dems suck too, but both sides are not the same. What kind of Swiss crack are they smoking to be able to pretend that the administration that created permanent tax cuts for the ultra wealthy, that I subsidize with my tax dollars, is a friend of the little guy? Or how about the administration that seated the court that bulldozed the right to privacy, while state courts pass censorship laws under the guise of child protections?
The guy is talking out both sides of his face and he’s an asshole. While I don’t think this is indicative of Proton’s services per se I am no longer a paying customer.
we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups
Insane equivocation. One of those is a national and ethnic group; the other is a political movement whose pet project is currently on trial for genocide… “we refused pressure to deplatform both Jewish student groups and National Socialist student groups”
I think that’s the entire point of the comment. They are impartial even to evil. They respect privacy.
Impartial to evil is… Well, just evil.
If I walk past a person beheading 3 people who have done nothing wrong, and am able to in fact stop it, and don’t… I’m just as fucking evil as the guy doing the beheading.
Indeed. When privacy gets involved it’s gets dicey and awkward.
i agree with you, but the company has now invited scrutiny openly by allowing a) andy to make this tweet (personal accout or no) and b) andy to make a follow up statement using the proton reddit account. people have a distaste now, so expect to see everything you say and do to be overanalyised.
“we refused pressure to deplatform both Jewish student groups and National Socialist student groups”
They are a Swiss company, yes.
Went to the replies to say this. You got here before me
I’m still confused how he could have been dumb enough to think, let alone imply, let alone say out loud, that Republicans want to reign in big tech, when they so transparently want to capture it and make it an even worse version of itself. It’s not that everything they do is a cynical power grab, it’s that everything they do is a blatant cynical power grab, and being in the privacy business without having a perfectly clear understanding of that feels equivalent to not knowing what a VPN is.
His statement here is great, and I support it whole-heartedly and unabashedly. It just feels almost…I don’t know, unrelated somehow? Even though ostensibly it isn’t.
If an employee did this and there was this much backlash that said employee would be promptly fired…
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In the US maybe, in the EU? Only if you want to get sued and then forced to re-hire them.
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So, we just believe that Proton, being buddy-buddy with Trump, isn’t going to turn around, and stab us in the backs?
Call me “skeptical”.
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Maybe I missed something, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that Andy/Proton likes Trump?
They said they agreed with one decision the republican party made, and pointed out how the democrats have been prioritising corporate interests.But what do I know, I’m not American, so I’m not incapable of understanding nuance like most Americans on the internet seem to be.
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IDC as long as they are not bending their knees to European countries that the EU hasn’t yet kicked out. But mainly I don’t care because I’m not American.
Assuming Andy Chen isn’t American, this is understandable:
“It should be obvious, but I will say that it is a false equivalence to say that agreeing with Republicans on one specific issue (antitrust enforcement to protect small companies) is equal to endorsing the entire Republican party platform.”
But it’s extremely tone deaf to Americans who live within the two party duopoly in the US, and who are sensitive to the fact that you can’t really be a compromise between the two (as politics stand, currently)
This makes sense to me from a framing perspective. As an American myself, despite my best efforts, I still fall into the same trap of sort of assuming everything is much more American centric than it actually is, including other people’s opinions on American politics from outside America.
His post does come off as wildly tone deaf, but seeing how he would have perceived it, it makes a lot of sense. He endorses policy by a party that shared his values, and then gets pushback for it from people who support his values. I’d probably be as confused as him if I was in his shoes.
Words are nothing, Andy should step away from proton.
are you basing this on previous words he used ?
Thank you for the chuckle! lol
Touché
Honestly all that noise was coming from Americans anyway, not a big deal They’re drama-queens. Never take Americans seriously on politics & economy (& also healthcare)
Am American. Can confirm that we are hyper reactionary. I read the tweet and shrugged it off, and rolled my eyes at the people claiming that Proton was now “dead” to them for bending the knee to Trump and were seeking out alternatives.
All of our American healthcare horror stories are true. Never take medical systems advice from us; our system is so evil and broken that our only possible recourse is “deposing” CEOs.
You are one of those exceptional ones
Literally none of this matters and its all just noise. American politics and Americans themselves are insane.
In the first comment after the second Proton toot, some queer woman complains about something related to the killing of people that are non-binary.
!Man, I love Mastodon.!<
Full context here for everyone.
Personally, that answer does not seem nearly enough and I believe he should stand down if he truly cared about the Proton project as a whole.
Stepping down would be a step in the right direction.
👆
I’m personally satisfied with the statement, position and reflection on the issue.
It was a fuck-up to publicly respond to donaldtrump in what could be seen as an endorsement. This was acknowledged and remedied.
The no politics stance is probably unavoidable, as mentioned but they should never focus on political parties, but on defending the values, this is what is clarified and that’s best. We should accept to support a bill strengthening privacy even if it may come from a political party we generally do not support. Denying our support to such a bill would not strengthen the core value we defend. And as individuals we may still criticize all other activities of such a political party if we disagree with others of their activities.
As a community, I hope we can come together, and resist the temptation of purity tests, and acknowledge that we are all fighting for the same cause, no matter our perspective on other issues. We need the support of everyone.
We should accept to support a bill strengthening privacy even if it may come from a political party we generally do not support.
Nobody on the left, afaik, rejects bills out of hand, purely because of which party promulgates it… The problem is, while the American Reich talks a lot about worker’s issues, the bills they propose are just oligarch hand outs, cloaked in socialist or populist ideas. ie, The PATRIOT Act was the least patriotic bill ever put forth, but NOBODY was allowed to be unPATRIOTic and vote against it. The left, opposed it. Same with the 1993 Crime Bill, put forth by Dems… Can’t be “anti-crime” now can we?
This comment is not the original. He changed it.
They seem to be two separate things. One is a comment, the other is a post.
Either way, if he believes this:
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.
he’s fucking dumb as a hammer
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When’s the last time the gop did something to prevent an abuse of any kind?
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This article goes into some details that I’ll just recklessly post a big section of here:
Then, after he won the election, Biden committed to the cause like no other president had in modern times. He appointed one of the movement’s brightest and most aggressive reformers, Lina Khan, to run the FTC, as well as other fierce critics of corporate concentration in key posts, including Jonathan Kanter, who took over the antitrust division of the DOJ, and Tim Wu, who became a key economic adviser inside the White House. Six months after taking office, Biden issued a whole-of-government executive order that called on 17 different government agencies to take 72 actions to foster competition and protect consumers against monopolies. As a result, agencies like the FTC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Food and Drug Administration have cracked down on public scourges like price gouging, noncompete contracts, and banking-related junk fees, and created new rules to make consolidated industries like the hearing aid market more competitive.
Under Kanter and Khan, the DOJ and FTC have also filed far more ambitious antitrust investigations than any administration in decades. Last summer, an investigation into several food production conglomerates over wage suppression and collusion resulted in an $85 million settlement, one of several successful DOJ investigations into no-poach and wage-fixing schemes across the economy. In December, the FTC successfully blocked the medical data firm IQVIA’s attempt to monopolize the business of advertising to doctors through the purchase of an ad tech company called DeepIntent. And in January, a judge sided with the DOJ in its suit against a JetBlue-Spirit merger, the first successful prosecution of an airline merger in 40 years.
The effect of a more aggressive posture from regulators goes beyond favorable court rulings: Under the threat of litigation, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, and the chipmaker Nvidia were some of the companies to back off multibillion-dollar acquisitions of smaller firms. Biden’s regulators filed a record 50 antitrust enforcement actions last year, and mergers dropped to a 10-year low.
These actions don’t get media attention because the media treats the government like some reality TV bullshit
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
Yeah because Trump will run it like musk runs Twitter. Bezos lost a huge contract last time he refused to bend the knee to Trump.
Yep, I especially appreciate the lack of apologies. An easy cop out would be to say he’s sorry but what would he be sorry for when he didn’t say anything wrong? This is a great response, and the only possible one. And still people will call it damage control.
His main point is outright wrong though. Republicans are not better at anti-trust, they’re the big money. Thinking Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos will protect small tech companies is laughable.
we are all fighting for the same cause
Catering to the “Libertarian” neo-Nazi crowd so they buy your product vs wanting to defend minorities against these sort of people is not the same cause
You’re confusing proton with our stance as a community which cares about privacy.
As a community the question is, will we shun anyone who cares about furthering our rights to privacy, because they have other stances on other issues?
Doing so is only isolating us and prevents us from making our issues heard and gathering more support across the political spectrum.
You can fight alongside someone you don’t agree with on other topics. It is not an endorsement for all they stand for.
I don’t value privacy for the sake of privacy, I value it because it’s useful for defending against capitalists and fascists who want an unequal society that commits genocides and incarcerates people for immutable characteristics. Fascists don’t value privacy for the sake of privacy either, for them it’s a tool to further their goals of creating the worst society possible. It comes down to a left vs right issue, I picked one side, and Proton picked to promote the other.
will we shun anyone who cares about furthering our rights to privacy, because they have other stances on other issues?
The Reich Wing doesn’t want to further your rights to privacy. Their “other stances” are that some humans are sub-human, and deserve to be extinct.
So, yes, you shun the people who think some humans are sub-human.
Perhaps I need to review my thoughts and either see how I really feel about this topic or find another way to express them.
Either way, you are making a compelling argument and I am not in disagreement.
Is he really using u/andy1011000? And he just started now? That’s binary for andy88, and isn’t 88 a well-known neo-Nazi dogwhistle as idiot code for “heil Hitler”?
Additional context:
88 is a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.” H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 = HH = Heil Hitler. One of the most common white supremacist symbols, 88 is used throughout the entire white supremacist movement, not just neo-Nazis.
Trouble is Andy, we now know what you privately think and all the follow up statements in the world can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
Proton is an org that exists in an industry whose customers do not trust easily. Publicly aligning with someone utterly untrustable, either as an individual or as a board, has tainted Proton and adversely affected peoples ability to trust. How can we ever know when Proton will find it acceptable again to respond positively to a Trumpian decision or how it might affect our privacy?
Literal thought policing (“what you privately think”) and quasi-religious purity logic (“has tainted Proton”). This nicely reveals the kind of busybodying inquisitorial mindset that keeps losing elections for US progressives and thus landing the rest of the world with Trump.
There’s an easy solution to the pseudo-problem you raise: judge Proton by its actions rather than the (utterly commonplace) opinions of one of its directors.
Literal thought policing (“what you privately think”)
Are you suggesting that a statement that he made is not what he thinks?
quasi-religious purity logic (“has tainted Proton”)
lol, sorry you’re incapable of processing descriptive language :) I’ll rephrase it to ‘has negatively affected Proton’s image in the eyes of some’.
This nicely reveals the kind of busybodying inquisitorial mindset that keeps losing elections for US progressives and thus landing the rest of the world with Trump.
Neither I, nor Proton, are American so its difficult to see how my opinion keeps landing the world with Trump.
Literal thought policing (“what you privately think”)
Your private thoughts, nobody cares about. He didn’t have a “private thought” exposed, he literally posted his thought publicly.
THATs the issue, and people can choose to disassociate with you, if you publicly ruminate how you’re going to work hand-in-hand with a fascist state.
judge Proton by its actions rather than the (utterly commonplace) opinions of one of its directors.
And, this is what we are doing. A CEO speaks for the organization, and telegraphs it’s actions. And his actions are gross.
If the org wants to fix this, they need to fire him. Because otherwise, his opinion is the opinion of the organization.
“Thought policing” is when you coerce someone to change their thoughts against their will. It is not boycotting a service because one does not agree with the service owner’s thoughts. That is not thought policing. That is a purely voluntary transaction on both sides, and that is one’s right as a consumer of said service. He is not entitled to customers.
It’s not thought policing. Proton, a company all about privacy, is literally nothing without the trust of its user base. Aligning with someone who is not trustworthy by making a statement that makes no sense (literally saying Trump’s administration will be anti-big tech while it’s been gaining shit tons of support from the Tech Titans Musk, Bezos, and Zuck) completely debases that trust. Additionally it’s not thought policing because companies are not people and cannot think.
Even if it was thought policing, in line with the Social Contract of Tolerance, there is no room to tolerate, let alone vocally support, fascists.
Hey bud, when you blurt out what you think “privately”, it’s no longer private, and people not liking what was said publicly isn’t “thought policing”.
Secondly, Protons actions include supporting this wackjob’s “private” thoughts.. Even by your asinine rubric, they’re allowed to be judged on that.
hey i remember you from yesterday’s thread, where you called the official proton’s account doubling down “significant if true” and still haven’t changed your tune
They walked it back and apologized.
I love user notes; this one has ‘fascist centrist’ attached, and lo and behold.
I was unaware this feature existed, how do you set this?
I can do it in the Boost for Lemmy app. I don’t know if you can do it via the web interface.
To be honest, many of not most CEOs probably privately think that way because it’s advantageous to their business. It’s a product of how the government is owned by the corporations. We all hate it but it’s simply The current state of affairs. It’s literally his job not to let it out into public that he feels that way.
The lines between fact (…) and opinion can be blurry at times
Are they though?
Fact: People make statements on social media they later regret.
Given the context, what is your opinion of that fact? Untimely? Biased? It’s still true. Facts are facts
Andy Yen, perched on ivory tower: “Why yes, they are a bit blurry up here.”
