Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it's actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.

I like Gail Slater. She's possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ's Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.

But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren't more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.

Andy Yen could've praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn't even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That's the problem everyone had with it.

Damn. People here sure love purity testing. The guy could pay for their cancer treatment and still slap him every chance because they got it wrong publicly in the past but once you get it wrong publicly once, you're out of the club. Go be a conservative we don't want you. When someone at Tuta has a bad year and ends up in the wrong publicly, find another email service to try and convince people to go too. Probably worse in functionality than Tuta as you go down to smaller and worse funded efforts in this niche field of Internet activism

But people here do it here too to Mozilla because they don't like their social outreach programs and their attempts to get advertising revenue so screw Mozilla too. So because nothing but perfection is acceptable, push away people that may be adjacent/left leaning right and switch to less developed products. Switch from Firefox and attack Mozilla who do the bulk of Firefox development and use Waterfox who do a custom deployment/build. Pure display of perfection being the enemy of good here.

You want people to embrace privacy but keep whiplashing people around when the org/anyone in leadership says something wrong. Screw Signal, they're not perfect. Screw Matrix/Element, some developer said something one day so it's all bad. I'm surprised anyone here uses any privacy software or a major open source software like Linux or Krita or Blender at the risk that someone in the background may be wrong in someway which I am 100% certain they exist in important positions. Same with Lemmy

Go back to the 60s and you all would be shitting on Fred Hampton for accepting the impure and the color coalition for everyone that had ever said something wrong. Al Franken definitely would not make it with y'all. Y'all can't build up leftist communities because y'all are bitter assholes that can't move on and spend so much time purity testing. Y'all are probably mediocre too so can't make a difference in privacy and data ownership activism anyways so should be lining up to support not just Tuta, someone hasn't screwed up publicly yet, and Proton

Reminds me of Aung San Suu Kyi. She was under the gun of the military ruling class that permitted limited democratic government and because she didn't make speech as if she lived in the US, a bunch of Americans turned on her and celebrated when the military dictatorship came back to rule and put her in prison the moment it seemed like the civilian government would actually assert more power

Why? Idiots thinking they know more than they do won't be stopped by this. Also if we wanted to round humanities and liberal arts by making it mandatory to pass analysis, linear algebra, organic chemistry and classical physics would just lead to much more people not graduating anything.

School is for a general education. Academia is for specialization.

Their CEO approved of an appointment Trump made, and criticized Dem on the issue -- doesn't make him a Trump supporter. If we can't tell the Dems off when we think the GOP does better, how can we proceed?

I am sad because of all the people in this thread who think the CEO is "fascist-sympathetic" because he said Trump did something better than the Democrats one time.

I'd use their VPN even if Hitler owns it. It's private, secure and they stand to their values with respect to that. Why would I care about political views? Politics don't change the service on a technical level. Literally don't give a shit.

Why is it bad though? This business is in no form related to politics. It wouldn't change fundamentally even if Hitler ran it.

I’m not going to willingly put my money towards someone who supports that kind of thing. The first response to my comment was a very level headed response and provided evidence that he does not directly support the administration.

Still doesn’t provide me a lot of consumer confidence though.

Absolutely agreed. I think when you have such role in a company you should avoid making political statements at all, because no matter what you say you will end up upsetting some people. In this case, "try-hard" democrats.

Except politics, actually, can change the service. For example, surrendering data in secret. Or installing backdoors.

Not that I think Proton is gonna do that (or at least hope so), but thinking "why would I care about politics, they don't affect the app on a technical level" is incredibly naive and potentially incorrect.

With an over-the-top example, it's kinda like saying "why should I care about the politics of my landlord after they support the "Increase Tenant's Rent" party, it doesn't change the service"

Well, it's worth leveraging your status to communicate to the politicians (i.e. this tweet). In this case, it cost him more than I think he was expecting.

If your threat model depends of political idiologies then you should reconsider your threat model.

Maybe you should reconsider your threat model. You seem to be very light on information. If political views is an issue than you're the issue.

Yeah, having only just switched from GMail to Proton last week my heart sank when I saw “Proton are MAGA”.

Then I spent three minutes reading up on it and it’s like, the CEO said one thing about policy on regulation of big tech that was critical of the Democrats for not doing enough, and the internet has decided that means he’s MAGA.

It's not a purity test so much as a fear that publicly signaling loyalty to trump devalued their trustworthiness as private and secure. If their CEO legitimately believes that Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats because conservatives want to weaponize the federal government to control speech online, then I don't really trust him not to cooperate with federal authorities when they want to access someone's emails or vpn traffic. Conservatives are simply not trustworthy to me

He said Republicans are better on tech policy than democrats. Republicans tech policy is motivated entirely by the fact that their racist and conspiratorial views were getting them banned on social media sites from 2015 - 2024

Conservatives have absolutely zero principles. If they say they want to break up big tech, it's because they want to control it in some way. They want the platforms to promote speech that's beneficial to them.

If you believe that Republicans truly are better for tech policy than democrats, then you either whole-heartedly agree that a group of criminals and wannabe dictators should be able to destroy any business that publishes speech against them, or you are extremely gullible. Either way, why would I want to give you my business?

People aren't criticizing him because he criticized the democrats. Liberals and leftists are pretty unhappy with the DNC right now, too. Anybody can criticize the democrats all day if they want, thats not forbidden.

They're criticizing him because the things he said are actually fucking braindead retarded.

This is literally just insane rambling. You need serious media literacy.

If a person signals loyalty to a criminal government which is violating the rights of its people daily, why would I trust them not to cooperate with that government when they ask for a backdoor to be installed? Conservatives are simply not trustworthy. They're lying, backstabbing, and manipulative. They have no principles at all and will say or do anything to acquire more power and money

This. It's amazing how naive people here can be just because they fanboyed some random CEO before they were revealed to be problematic.