Proton CEO endorses Trump nominee for assistant attorney general

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There are two overlapping concerns I’d like to address seperately:

  1. Politics topics on PG.

This is my main point I’m trying to argue is that folks here should be free and I’d argue encouraged to discuss state and international politics and how that influences them as an individual and informs their threat model. This is also the perfecr type of forum to encourage folks to practice tolerance because it is a smaller yet diverse (we got lefties, righties, innies, and outies here) mixture of people with varying attitudes. Yet, we all share the idea that privacy is a human right and thats a common ground we should always fall back to when learning how to coexist.

  1. Politics affecting PG recommendations.

I haven’t read every comment on this thread or on Reddit but I believe most of us here agree that Jonah’s freedom to express his political beliefs shouldn’t affect PG recommendations in the same way thay Proton’s CEO’s freedom to express his opinions on Trump shouldn’t cause people to believe that Proton’s product is somehow compromised.

On comparing ourselves with Tuta and others who avoid political discussion in the workplace or technical communities. First, they are not wrong or right for making such decisions if that is their policy, but we shouldn’t argue for homogeneity either.

Silencing political discussion and other aspects of our identity removes the humanity from the discussion and takes away another opportunity for us to truly know people we interact with while exercising our ability to have good faithed dissent. That’s also not going to the other extreme of saying you have to discuss or divulge your political interests, we should make the lanes on when and where to discuss it clear, and attempt to promote good faithed discussions with a code of conduct.

A lot of the elements we don’t like about police states and surveillance capitalism all stem from a lack of trust. If we don’t practice tolerance in small communities where we have so many other aspects in common, where do we practice it? Certainly not X or Facebook. Having political discussions about class and identity enables us to know that people who differ from us are trustworthy and are equally valuable and valid in their opinions. Especially those in a minority.

So, yeah still happy to have a more focussed discussion about this on another thread if PG folks are interested.

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Official statement from Andy Yen on Reddit with clarifications and updates:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/?rdt=53212

Now let this debate end here.

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Copy-pasted Andy Yens response from Reddit since they aggressively block VPN users

On Politics and Proton - a message from Andy

Hi all, last night, a post from last year from my personal X account suddenly became a topic of discussion here on Reddit. I want to share a few thoughts on this to provide clarity to the community on what is Proton’s policy on politics going forward.

First, while the X post was not intended to be a political statement, I can understand how it can be interpreted as such, and it therefore should not have been made. While we will not prohibit all employees from expressing personal political opinions publicly, it is something I will personally avoid in the future. I lean left on some issues, and right on other issues, but it doesn’t serve our mission to publicly debate this. 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.

Second, officially Proton must always be politically neutral, and while we may share facts and analysis, our policy going forward will be to share no opinions of a political nature. The line between facts, analysis, and opinions can be blurry at times, but we will seek to better clarify this over time through your feedback and input.

The exception to these rules is on the topics of privacy, security, and freedom. These are necessarily political topics, where influencing public policy to defend these values, often requires engaging politically.

The operations of Proton have always reflected our neutrality. For example, recently we refused pressure to deplatform both Palestinian student groups and Zionist student groups, not because we necessarily agreed with their views, but because we believe more strongly in their right to have their own views.

It is also a legal guarantee under Swiss law, which explicitly prohibits us from assisting foreign governments or agencies, and allows us no discretion to show favoritism as Swiss law and Swiss courts have the final say.

The promise we make is that no matter your politics, you will always be welcome at Proton (subject of course to adherence to our terms and conditions). When it comes to defending your right to privacy, Proton will show no favoritism or bias, and will unconditionally defend it irrespective of the opinions you may hold.

This is because both Proton as a company, and Proton as a community, is highly diverse, with people that hold a wide range of opinions and perspectives. It’s important that we not lose sight of nuance. Agreeing/disagreeing with somebody on one point, rarely means you agree/disagree with them on every other point.

I would like to believe that as a community there is more that unites us than divides us, and that privacy and freedom are universal values that we can all agree upon. This continues to be the mission of the non-profit Proton Foundation, and we will strive to carry it out as neutrally as possible.

Going forward, I will be posting via u/andy1011000. Thank you for your feedback and inputs so far, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

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Thanks. I commented on mobile so couldn’t do that.

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you can do it on mobile actually… but whatever

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Seems like Andy deleted the replies @jonah, does anyone have a screenshot? They are trying to cover this up really hard.

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bro, move on. He already issued a statement ending this whole debacle. That’s why they got deleted. They’re not trying to hide it, It was Andy realizing his mistake.

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That’s a good response, respect to Andy.

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The people who care about this aren’t going to move on because their ability to think neutrally has been overridden by their loyalty to political party. Andy expressed the “wrong opinion” and now he suffers the Two Minutes Hate. My reply to this thread got flagged/removed because it called them out for that.

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Your reply likely got flagged because you called people “shitlibs” and not because you called somebody out

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In the spirit of “Everything has already been said, but not by everyone” let’s end the thread here. Closed.

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