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)
proton is cia
proton is ciait’s modern crypto AG
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”.
“Here at Proton, we believe that all life is sacred, thats why we gave the IP addresses of pregnant teens who are planning to get an abortion”
(even compiling the user client yourself won’t protect against IP logging, also, external emails arrive at proton servers in plain text)
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.
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.!<
Yeah, I pay for Proton to try it out. I was liking it but this guy bending the knee to someone like trump is a huge red flag. I won’t be renewing my subscription!
a post from last year from my personal X account suddenly became a topic of discussion here on Reddit.
You mean last month right.
this is the most “i think my userbase are idiots” statement anybody could make. like do you think we dont know how time works andy? fuck you
Yeah, last year, 2024. Stupid way of intentionally phrasing it.
Almost without fail, every service that touches creeptocurrencies goes into a decline.
Don’t expect Proton to make virtuous ethical choices anytime soon, especially now that Trump joined the cult. Once the greed bug has bitten, making a profit supersedes delivering a good product as the primary objective.
Crypto Cult Science
“Money corrupts; bitcoin corrupts absolutely. Disregarding all of bitcoin’s shortcomings, a financial instrument that brings out the worst in people—greed—won’t change the world for the better.” —https://www.arscyni.cc/file/crypto_cult_science.htmlhttps://fosstodon.org/@stardust/112404108681755769
The only crypto to trust is XMR. Its blockchain is very opaque in contrast to Bitcoin.
I mean, I’m all for crypto, but proton posting about holding BTC is cringe
I don’t agree with your first sentence though. There is some logic to using crypto, but solely using it as « haha numbers go up, profit, profit! » is stupid
I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues
Holy shit I feel so STUPID for giving $30 a month for this clown. I am so pissed, I hate myself for allowing myself to migrate my stuff all over thinking it would be fine. I am so fucking pissed right now.
The American mind cannot grasp liking specific policies of a given party
There are no specific policies of the GOP, Trump, or the American Reich that are positive for anyone but oligarchs.
Well he did build the Autobahn…
And the allies countries did far worse things in their colonies but whos counting
that doesn’t really help your point seeing as we are talking about a fascist presiding over one of those colonies that was part of the alliance against Hitler.
You need to understand the Republican party is a fascist one. Giving anything to them is a mistake.
Whole cognitive dissonance thing is stronger in American than Russia at this point Putin’s won. Can’t even like a single policy idea that’s good and talk about it being good. I’m confused why this is even a big deal and I fucking hate trump. I think half the morons on the Internet forget the way to manipulate trump is to praise him and then you can convince him to do good or bad. Or whatever. Hes worse than Joe Rogan. He just parrots the last person who stroked his ego.
Oh, Putin’s still a loser. The US is just following him into incompetence and cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Nobody wins here.
Yeah. Agreed. I was just bitching lol
There are no single policies of the GOP that are “good” for anyone but oligarchs. Reich Wingers aren’t your friends. And, if you believe them to be, you’ll be one of the firsts in the Night of the Long Knives.
Jezus fucking christ, do people not read history anymore?
You can tell Andy is European because he does not understand American politics.
If you say anything positive about an American politician it means you will stan them for life and support all their actions unconventionally.
Likewise if you say anything negative about an American politician it means hate everything they stand for.
The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.
It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.
And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.
If you say anything positive about an American politician it means you will stan them for life and support all their actions unconventionally.
There is nothing positive about the GOP, Trump, or the American Reich Wing.
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”
“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 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.
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.
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.
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…
I’m not sure about that. There are a lot of right wingers who also use proton (ya know, like the right wing “libertarian” tech-bro types). If they remove Andy from the board, there no doubt Proton is getting labeled as “woke”, they lose either way. Honestly, making political comments in the first place, is just a no-win scenario for a privacy-focused mission, which wasn’t even that left-right partisan to begin with. He should have just STFU, and everything would be fine.
In the US maybe, in the EU? Only if you want to get sued and then forced to re-hire them.
He isn’t an employee tho, he’s a member of a board of trustees of the non-profit organization who owns Proton AG. The other board members could say that he’s veering off-couse from the mission of the non-profit and remove him. (But then this move could also angers the right-wing “libertarian” tech-bro types of people that use Proton. So this political debacle was gonna fuck up the trust in Proton either way, Andy should’ve just STFU to begin with.)
