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Proton CEO tweets support for Donald Trump's Department of Justice pick and the US Republican Party
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- Title
- Andy Yen on X (formerly Twitter): "Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin. pic.twitter.com/0XVVO2ffcH / X"
- Authors
- Andy Yen
Absurd lack of judgment tweeting this even if he genuinely believed in Gail Slater given most of their target market is the anti-authoritarian privacy-conscious type.
Terrible judgment for sure, but I'm actually glad he's chosen to show this publicly so the rest of us can make more informed decisions about their services. Not only are the politics abhorrent, the tweet itself literally flies in the face of observable reality - and having someone like that in charge is a risk to my data that I appreciate having flagged like this.
Yeahhhhh...
How do I get my 2 year subscription back?
VPN recommendations anyone?
Mullvad is the only option
oh no. Is PIA not still trustworthy?
I was a satisfied PIA customer for many years but the Kape acquisition really soured me on them (as did degradation of the Mac client and increased connection flakiness in general). I bailed for Mullvad and haven’t regretted it for a moment.
Is Mozilla VPN not good anymore?
Mozilla VPN actually is Mullvad under the hood, they're piggybacking off their infrastructure.
Mozilla is Mullvad, with an extra dollar a month added for little reason.
Name recognition.
Ugh, I just switched from them to Proton lmao because Proton VPN + drive were basically the same/slightly cheaper than Mullvad + OneDrive, and MS was being shitty with my new debit card 🤣
Users discovered a December 2024 tweet from Andy Yen, the founder and CEO of Proton (formerly ProtonMail). The tweet voices support for the U.S. Republican Party and Gail Slater, Donald Trump's pick to lead the Department of Justice's antitrust division. Many subscribers became concerned by his statement considering Proton is a Swiss company that doesn't need to be involved in U.S. politics or associated with any political parties.
Proton followed up by posting an "official response" on Reddit (archived), Mastodon, and Bluesky, which have been largely
interruptedinterpreted as doubling down on the original statements. These have since been removed. Andy Yen stated on Reddit that they were not official responses and cited "internal miscommunication." (source)Gail Slater's resume includes Fox Corporation and Roku. She helped lead the Internet Association, a lobbying group for big tech companies that shut down in 2021.
I think you mean "interpreted" rather than "interrupted" in your second paragraph
Yes, thank you.
Well that just ruined my day.
...Anyone has recommendations for a privacy conscious email service? The renewing date for my 24-months Proton Unlimited plan is coming up soon-ish and I suddenly am no longer confident I wish to continue using their services. I conveniently just set up a nextcloud instance for myself so that handles data storage, I can switch to VaultWarden for password management, I wasn't using their VPN much but if I started needing one I have Mullvad in mind, which leaves email, which I'd prefer to not have to self host given that the last time I attempted it ended in a resounding failure.
I need this too. Upvote.
I just switched to Proton from Hey.com. JFC.
Are there any mail providers with privacy and an app that doesn't suck????
I miss Google Inbox. Of course, that's a brilliant product that they had to cancel.
There's some controversy around Tuta due to a social media ad campaign they ran in 2022.
For those who don't want to click the link:
moderately NSFW Text
The post says "don't get cucked by big tech" and uses a picture easily identified as a thumbnail for a pornographic "gangbang" video.
The co-founder also posted about the whole Trump family registering Tuta email addresses in 2017. Quotes from the post, emphasis mine:
I mean, clearly the guy is coming at it from the perspective of “privacy good,” but the language weighting is still a little… partisan for my liking.
Edit: forgot to post the actual article - https://web.archive.org/web/20170220211926/https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/trump-family-encryption/
A little partisan? Public servants are not supposed to have privacy while running higher offices. The text is blatantly partisan.
Oh, for sure, my Midwestern milquetoast people-pleaser language leaked through a little bit. I agree that it’s plain as day.
Seconding Runbox. Been using them for a handful of years. They are way more basic email than Proton, but I like that about them. It is very "unfancy", just standard email at reasonable pricing.
I don’t know what you want out of an email service, but I really like FastMail.
I also use Fastmail and am pretty happy with them (webmail and Android app both suit all my needs fine).
From a privacy standpoint, they may not be perfect (they are subject to Australian law and comply with valid requests from authorities there), but at least they are fairly transparent about it.
Right, I should have specified. My requirements are the following:
I might be missing something (I never thought "The CEO doesn't suck up to Donald Trump on Twitter" needed to be an explicit requirement but evidently it is, for one) but that's the gist of it. From what I see fastmail and mailbox both seem to be good options, I'll start looking into them.
I am not sure FastMail fits all your requirements, but I think it gets pretty dang close.
Bonus: They don't just sit on their laurels and not innovate. Imap, smtp, and pop all suck in different ways. I have done a small bit of programming against smtp, and it is so finicky to set up. They agree, and built an entirely new "standard" for email. I put "standard" in scare quotes because nobody but them currently support it, but it's an open standard so the industry could support it if they wanted. It's called jmap, and they have more details here: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/jmap-new-email-open-standard/. I think it's pretty neat to see this sort of innovation in the email space. And yes, they still support imap et al, and will continue to support those indefinitely.
Bonus 2: They have really good migration tools to import your existing email history. I have no idea how it works with proton mail, but I have used it successfully with gmail. It can also set up imap/smtp sending from your old email. That way fast mail essentially becomes a frontend for your gmail/etc. I doubt that would work with proton, and it sounds like you have your own domain anyway, but if you have some old addresses it might be useful. I have had some issues with it and a yahoo email address, but I am almost positive it is a yahoo issue.
I usually hate dropping referral codes into conversations like this. I think it makes me look like I am just saying things to get the kickback. But I am going to anyway: https://join.fastmail.com/5a7bc1d6. That gets you 10% off your first year (I think it might have to be yearly billing, but they don't specify) and gets me a $10 credit. Just to clarify, I stand by everything I said here, and I would have said it even if Fastmail didn't have a referral program. My first charge was $5 on February 7 of 2021 and I have been a happy customer since then.
If you have any more questions about my experience, I would be happy to answer them.
I've been a Fastmail customer since starting to de-google where I can, since 2018. I'm also on the 3 year plan nowadays, and will happily cosign the entirety of this post.
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. According to a cursory search, the main complaint I see against Fastmail is not offering end-to-end encryption (which to be honest I'm not really after, email doesn't really come to my mind when I need to send data sensitive enough to warrant E2E), and concerns about their vulnerability to intelligence agencies due to being based in Australia which is a Five Eyes country. And while that's definitely not good news in the strict sense, I can't help but see worrying about this as equivalent to having a thermonuclear warhead in the neighborhood and worrying that the bomb's blast might push my neighbor's improperly parked car into my yard if it were to arm and detonate. In plainer words, if I somehow get on the bad side of any of the FVEY agencies the integrity of my email address is the least of my worries.
Looking up whether Fastmail had a known history of suffering data breaches didn't yield much other than this thread on Hacker News, highlighting an instance of an attacker successfully breaking into a customer's account through the password recovery procedure despite the account itself not being compromised because their security policy allowed it to come down to an employee's judgement call. What it also highlighted is that the incident happened roughly ten years ago and the password recovery procedure had since been hardened to not involve human decision at all, fixing the vulnerability. I haven't found anything else of note, so if that's indeed the only time Fastmail had a significant security breach that's encouraging. Do you happen to have more insight regarding this?
Right now I'm not awake enough to commit to any financial decision... as evidenced by the fact a more careful look made me realize just now that my subscription to Proton Unlimited is set to renew on the 2nd of February 2026, not 2025, making finding a replacement significantly less urgent than I thought, but I'll definitely keep Fastmail and that referral link in mind when next year comes around. Even if Proton regained enough trust for me to overlook this incident, this isn't my only grievance with their service and given that my self hosted server is gradually making everything other than ProtonMail itself redundant, I'm actually better off switching to a cheaper service that only offers the part I still need when my subscription runs out.
I saw that thread too when I was looking for breaches. Social engineering is very real, and the possibility of it happening to your email account is pretty serious. I haven't heard of any other breaches. I am sure that they will be hit by a breach eventually, since data breaches are a fact of modern life.
Overall, I think I went through a similar process as you. I just don't care about security from state-sponsored groups. It's just not in my threat model. I used proton mail a long time ago, back when the imap bridge was just released into public beta. Proton is a good product, but it makes so many sacrifices for the goal of encryption. If you need that, I am glad proton exists, but I don't need that. And that was before them publicly supporting Trump.
I think the best thing I can say about Fastmail is that I just don't have to worry about email anymore. It is a high quality and reliable service. The only other email program that I have used that was also high quality and reliable was gmail, and that has all the google data problems and killing good features like inbox.
Good luck in your decision. Hopefully with the extra time you have you can find the best email provider for you.
Fastmail has been good to me too. It’s a rock-solid standards-compliant (unlike Gmail) IMAP mail service that works great with whatever client you prefer (for me, mostly Apple Mail). I rarely use their official mobile app or web app but those are pretty decent too and a lot less bloated than that of the big guys - reminds me a lot of the snappy minimal “web 2.0” web apps of yesteryear.
Perhaps not an exact replacement, but a reasonable alternative might be mailbox.org. You can have all you incoming emails encrypted with your public gpg key if that is something you require. I have used them for a few years with zero issues.
Yeah, I like them a lot and they’re really cheap for what you get.
Same here and I’m a very happy customer. Highly recommended.
I use – and am extremely happy with – IONOS.
They’re primarily a web hosting company which also offers email packages. It’s a bit more involved than a Gmail/Proton-like email service, but definitively distinct from full on self-hosting or anything like that.
What you then receive is a "generic“ email (so no special app like @elight mentioned), but you can use their webmail login in addition to any old client like Thunderbird/default OS mailer program/etc. Just put in the values for imap, smtp domains and ports used and it’ll work (don’t worry, this is a set-and-forget once type of action, and they have guides for it out there.)
You'd need to bring your own domain, however. Due to the way I split up email inboxes by their purpose (personal/business/purchase/newsletters/…), the best value for me was the 25 addresses plan, but no matter which way you decide, costs should remain anywhere from one to under five euros per month, IIRC. (I also have webhosting with them, so I’m not quite sure off the top of my head how the monthly payment splits itself between the two services.)
Ditto. I was driven from 1and1 around 2010 I think? It was after a long time trying to keep my hosting account usable. Long and the short of it was pricing that was optimized to choose between a site that would take like 40 seconds to load, or 5x'ing my hosting bill. Nothing in between.
It wasn't smooth exiting either. They did the ol' DNS "it'll take 2 weeks to transfer" lock-in. It was so bad I finally bit the bullet and did it. Moved to a LiquidWeb VPS after that for a long time.
EU-based, I believe. So not perfect, but at least subject to GDPR.
Out of curiosity, could you (broadly) say in which business area you had issues?
I believe they used to have/still have? home ISP and mobile phone contracts, but split off that part and mostly do hosting & email now, so the concerns may be unwarranted nowadays.
Edit; it seems this is the case if I’m understanding the Wikipedia entry correctly:
Oof, sorry to hear that. Fingers crossed it’ll continue to work out for me…
Everybody’s lining up to kiss the ring. I guess court politics are back in fashion!
You've succintly put into words what I've been feeling over the last month.
I think terrible people are emboldened across the board, and uncaring, unethical businesspeople just want to do and say what they think will ensure the most profit for their businesses going forward.
I feel like it is impossible and fruitless at this point to "vote with your wallet."
Allmost every area of commerce is currently monopolized or dominated by a very few massive companies. The owners/CEO/board members are all extremely wealthy (mostly white, male) people who have no interest in the common good. Of course they are going to support political parties that cater to the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us.
The fact that the proton guy kept his opinions quiet until recently does not mean that his company was better before, just that he was better at PR.
In my personal situation (rural US, disabled,mostly homebound) I am limited to extremely distasteful companies for almost everything. Locally for groceries, there is only Walmart or Albertsons. Hardware? Home Depot or Tractor Supply. My partner's rx insurance forces us to use Walgreens (or we could go without). I use Amazon to get things delivered. I used to try to find things at small businesses that deliver, but whereas that was difficult but possible 15 years ago, most of that has gone.
I use Protonmail. It works pretty well though I have had bad experiences with their customer service. I'd be happy to switch if there were a real alternative, but at this point I don't think I would switch believing that the new company was any better morally or politically. Its pretty disheartening.
Alright, I'm going to get a lot of hate (or disagreement) for this, but please do play devil's advocate and hear me out.
I keep seeing posts like these either on Tildes/Reddit/Hackernews/personal blogs. One post from a CEO or a prominent person makes people go into a frenzy and they immediately want to switch services. It's like, Proton CEO tweeted something (whether a month ago or a decade ago) and people want to switch to something else. Kagi chooses to use Yandex and people are furious and watch to switch. Buy Tesla few years ago when Elon was sane, but once he starts saying shit, sell Tesla? Stuff like that. It's interesting to see this pattern show up again and again.
I'm all for voting with your dollar/click/subscription/etc. And I'm all for taking a stand and not funding something nefarious. But where's the line? Just because I don't agree with one person's view on one thing, does that mean I should stop using all their services? I know it's up to the individual to consider what subscription is worth stopping and what is worth continuing, and how much something means to them. Also, if I dig up anybody's past tweets or conversations, isn't it likely for me to find something you disagree with? Isn't this particular outrage just because it happened to show up on my feed? Is that enough grounds for not using their product?
Why not just use a product just because it's good? Because this argument seems to somehow work well for iPhones. Everybody knows how Apple uses (or at least used to for a very long time) cheap labor with horrible working conditions to manufacture iPhones. But that's somehow okay for everyone. I mean, when was the last time we did a thorough reasearch on whether the CEO of the company that makes the toothpaste we use didn't tweet anything weird?
Having said all this, I get it. I was this person. I was the same way when WhatsApp introduced a change in their Terms of Service a few years ago and I uninstalled WhatsApp. I tried convincing my friends to switch to Signal and not all of them did (because nobody they knew was on WhatsApp). I ended up losing contact with them and a couple of years later I reinstalled WhatsApp so I could talk to them again. I took a stand against WhatsApp for a couple of years. Was it worth it? No. To me it created more friction than I expected. I also switched from Gmail to Protonmail because I didn't want Google mining my emails for data.
The switching cost for replacing services like these are very high. I mean, what are my next steps supposed to look like? Happen to see a tweet, get triggered, spend the next few days/weeks thoroughly researching an alternate secure email provider, then spend the next several weeks moving all my accounts to a different email? Update my password manager along the way as well? And then what? Repeat this whole thing all over again when that email provider's CEO tweets something I don't agree with?
Sigh!
I don't have an answer. I cannot have an answer. It depends on the individual. Having been that kind of person, I just feel it's not worth it. I learned over the years to let go of most things. Life's too short for high switching costs. I just want to get through the day doing things I enjoy. Just because I happen to see a tweet from someone, if that turns my next few weeks into a frenzy, then it's not worth it.
I'm sure I may have gotten some of the data or even the worldview wrong. I feel, just like how people have knee-jerk reactions to this kind of news, I'm having a meta knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of posts.
PS: Please do not feel personally attacked by my views. Everybody has opinions, I respect yours and this one's mine.
I don't think this is a matter of disagreement as it is that there is an moral horizon that is being crossed. Nobody's dropping those things because the CEO prefers Pepsi instead of Coke. Simplifying the protestations to being a matter of "disagreeing" is flattening the situation into an entirely different (and fictional) issue.
If you feel okay with using the products of people who are getting behind the idea of persecuting other Americans and invading Canada and destroying democracy through all manner of lies and disinformation that they're knowingly spreading, then good on you. But is it really that big a mystery why that might be a bit too much for others?
Everyone has their own sense of where this line is for them as well. For some a shitty (or disagreeable) CEO isn't a problem until the company starts making decisions they don't like. For others we cut out of our lives entirely. Both are valid. I know queer people that eat Chick-fil-A, and those who never have and never will. Boycotting Hobby Lobby is easy until they're the only game in town and you're deciding between them and Amazon in ethics.
I think it's good, even ideal, to be responsive to one's ethics. And to at least understand that the smart phone was built with horrible conditions, and the car is polluting the environment rather than pretending otherwise. Or that there's a pattern of CEOs seeming to show deference to Trump and the GOP, in a way that makes it look akin to the idea that they've always wanted to say a slur but it wasn't ok until now. It's gross and I don't like it, and companies that go down that road fall lower on my ethics list.
And yet sometimes I'll read a WaPo article or order off Amazon. Because life keeps lifing.
I largely agree with your perspective. It's surprising and disappointing for an executive of a privacy-focused firm to make the statements he made. As we look around us, though, it's evident that the vast majority of companies are willing to do whatever will allow them to stay open and turn a profit. I encourage anyone that feels shocked to take a look at Wikipedia's List of companies involved in the Holocaust. And the world goes 'round.
Google sucks; I pay for Workspace. Microsoft sucks; I'm studying for one of their certs. Apple sucks; I have several of their devices. Meta sucks; I still use WhatsApp. Nestle sucks; I love a bottle of Pellegrino on occasion. The brands and conglomerates we do business with are not our identities. Living with integrity and as a person of character is so much more than flitting from one corporation to another.
It has long been felt that Nazi collaborators and sympathizers were not punished enough. You'll find many people still hate Bayer and wish the company and its leadership at the time were tried along with Nazi high command.
Certainly, and there's a similar pattern today. It's a tough pill to swallow, but these purchasing decisions do not make a difference. These people have so much more money, power, and influence, it's incomprehensible.
Recognizing what we can control and what we cannot is important to happiness. Make the decision that helps you sleep at night. My great-grandfather served in the US military during WWII. He despised seeing someone he believed to be a "Hitlerite" in the US government. And he took Bayer Back and Body every day because it helped to relieve his aches and pains.
I also think it's important, that where we can, we also strive to break apart these conglomerate companies that hold so many brands.
Broad context, much as I don’t like it, I very much get where you’re coming from.
In this very specific instance, though, I think it’s more than just a question of ethics - the nature of the product depends on trust in the provider as well as a measure of shared ideology when it comes to privacy. Obviously it depends on each user’s specific reasons for using proton, but especially as a smaller company where the CEO has a fair amount of direct control, this could be a sign that the product itself is becoming compromised.
I think you're on to something.
It might look like a knee jerk reaction if you consider the chain of events as coming from a monolithic block for each incident, and for some people it very well might be, but just like everything that happens at scale it's more nuanced than that. All the people reacting to this specific incident with "screw this, I'm out" (such as myself) are not necessarily the same people who decided to storm out when Kagi made a deal with Yandex (coincidentally, I happen to also use Kagi, and after looking into the matter at the time I didn't consider it something to leave Kagi over), and so on, nor did they necessarily do it for the same reason.
What they do have in common is that they're the strongest reactions, which you are naturally going to notice a lot more than the (probably much more numerous) people who were mildly disappointed (or didn't care at all) and carried on with their day without interacting with the comment section at any point. Among the people who did react more strongly, there are obviously bound to be people overreacting, but there will also be many people who after looking into it decided that this specific incident was what crossed the line for a variety of sensible reasons, and wanted to make it known.
Since social media is gonna social media, it's inevitably the strongest reactions (rational or not) that get the most engagement and therefore get bunched together at the top of the discussion space... but this doesn't mean that the community averages out to an eternal maelstrom of rage ready to descend upon the slightest moral failing by whoever made the mistake of walking in front of Twitter's spotlight that day. Even for a relatively small website like this one, out of the thousands of users registered on Tildes, there is bound to be at least a small group of people who feel strongly about a given submission each time. Same goes with Reddit... except the userbase is larger by several orders of magnitude.
My two cents: boycotts have a cost (can be money, time, energy, etc), and problems occur when people act like they're free.
If it were just money, it would be more concrete. Let's say the local food bank has run out of food and is having to turn down hungry people, so they put out an urgent call for donations. The local community is chattering things like "I just gave $100!" and "Hunger is such an important issue." Now for you, maybe money is tight, and you personally decide against donating. That ought to be okay! It would be out of line for someone to criticize you for "supporting hunger" or "this is a matter of right and wrong" or "if you actually cared…"
If the money isn't there, the money isn't there, and nobody should be making anybody feel bad. Same thing goes if the time/energy/spoons aren't there.
I'm disappointed because I'd just recently switched to Proton from Dropbox for cloud sync, and now I have to find an alternative. Any suggestions? I'm not interested in self-hosting, so I realize I may have to accept an imperfect solution.
I've been eyeing Tresorit and Nextcloud.
I made the jump over to Tresorit from Proton Drove today. The software is clean and easy to use. Getting to the individual plan was a pain imo. Navigating the site, you will find several services Tresorit provides (aimed at a business level rather than a personal level) and a personal plan which does its job. Uploaded everything, shared links, shared files, and had no issues. Tresorit is not as snappy as Proton, but that is fine by me.
I myself like how the service is owned by the Swiss Post (the nation's postal service). Having a nation state supporting a E2EE service is kind of neat and gives me a feeling of permanence.
Also been considering self-hosting Nextcloud
I use Sync.com. You can get 2TB for $98 per year.
Great, now I have to switch email provider again.
TutanTuta has been extremely annoying to get approve that I gave up now proton does this.Edit: Tuta not Tutan
Are you talking about tuta mail in your second sentence? What problems have you had exactly? I ask because I don't know what kind of problems their service has, as a non-user. Is it a serious one?
Yeah, it was Tuta. Was (and still is) not in a place to afford a good email subscription, so I was trying out Tuta since they have a free tier like Proton. Tuta ask you to write a letter to support to detail why you use it to avoid abuse, been sending quite a few emails spread over a month but no dice. I'd image they're far more amenable to paid user, but then why just not accept free users in the first place. For now, I would stop migrating away from gmail until I was able to afford to a paid one
Interesting, I had no idea there was a level that required that sort of manual involvement, thanks.
For reference, I signed up and haven't been asked to do this.
I did have some anti-tracking measure on my browser, that and I was in 3rd world country. To be fair, I only receive the request after a while letting it sit there (because normally I don't have any mail at all)
They have a much better response now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i2nz9v/on_politics_and_proton_a_message_from_andy/
It doesn't start out great.
It was last month. People aren't digging up ancient history here.
And this:
How could it be anything except political?
This also raises eyebrows:
I mean, a post that explicitly gives an opinion Trump, Republicans, and "Dems" wasn't intended to be political? C'mon dude...
Dude literally said that the Republicans were the party of small business and he is really claiming that he is not making political statements.
Can’t believe I recommended proton so much, I already cancelled my subscription, now I have to find another place to migrate my email too.
Same here. I am rescinding my recommendation of the Proton services. I'm disgusted.
Tildron VPN & email? Let's do it.
It's thoroughly depressing to me the number of comments on there suggesting that this is fine now or that the main issue was him boosting the issue via an official account. Suggesting that the Republicans stand "for the little guys" is completely divorced from the facts of the situation and needs to be addressed.
Treating this like a run of the mill personal opinion vs company stance issue is exactly the kind of sanewashing that legitimises Trump's dangerous absurdity in the first place.
Can you point me to said comments because I can’t see them anywhere…
A snapshot of what I'm seeing of the thread (maybe presented differently to you? I don't know how much reddit likes to shuffle these things nowadays).
Top comment (282 points), with several replies agreeing, one disagreeing:
Second comment (158 points):
The third is a one-liner saying he's being disingenuous calling it "last year" when it was only a few weeks ago.
Fourth and fifth (43 and 82 points respectively) are saying things I agree with, about the political context rather than just the mechanics of how it was posted, so it's not like the thread is unanimously bad - but it's definitely got a heavy presence of highly upvoted posts in the vein that I mentioned above.
After that, we're back to:
79 points
109 points
And then a mixed bag of replies beyond that, with much smaller numbers of upvotes.
Ahhh sorry I misunderstood you. I thought you meant here in this thread. Thanks for clearing that up.
Very stupid move to use the official X account, however, I'm not particularly bothered, the service is good and they're right to stay out of politics moving forward.
I'm numb to it, it's been 'person tweets X so now they're enemy number one' for years now.
An archive link to some of their correspondence has me even less concerned, but that's me taking the information at face value.
Man, come on. I literally just decided to finally give Proton a shot a few weeks ago, so this is beyond disappointing. At this point, is anyone in a position of influence not competing in brown-nosing up to this guy?
Rhetorical, hyperbolic question; no need to @ me.
Also — way off topic, but it aggravates me, so I’ll just take this opportunity to poke at it: We’ve really ramped up this year on our collectively referring to these nominees for powerful, prestigious political appointment as ‘picks’ like it’s the fucking NFL draft, and that is probably not helping us retain a much needed sense of decorum around these proceedings.
It was not always like this; even looking back at a few headlines from 2016 and 2020, one can see the shift in language to go along with the shift in the manner in which we view and relate to politics. It’s all just whose team is winning, whose players are the most entertaining to watch; one-upmanship and engagement at any and all costs.
And, for some unfathomable reason, many of us seem incapable of not conveniently catering our speech to serve the worldviews and behaviors of people we do not agree with or even like.
I’ve been shouting into the wind about this for years, though, starting way-back-when with the framing of the various bodily autonomy debates, so I am well-aware of how much people disagree with me… but I’m also aware that I’m right, lol. After all, good marketing strategy is everything, and swaying one’s audience and opponents into the habit of using the vocabulary which favors one’s own framing of a situation is one of the key components to controlling the narrative.
Yes of course. But they’re shutting up because they want to remain in their positions. Or they’re sucking up to Trump while pinching their nose.
The American masses have shown that anyway truth doesn’t matter, decorum is useless and civil society is pointless.
So might as well lie.
It's specifically a tweet in support of more aggressive anti-trust and the failures of the Democratic Party to meaningfully execute on anti-trust, which is all 100% accurate.
The CEO of a company can voice support for a policy without blatantly sucking up to a gormless wannabe dictator that stands against every principle the company they are leading is allegedly based on. The fact that the latter happened is what I find reprehensible.
Again, agreeing on something is not the part I have an issue with. Greg's reply below sums it up better than I would.
If that were the case I'd be a lot less concerned - there are ways to express that (and engage with the sad reality that Trump is going to run policy based on personal whims, which is something I can at least understand trying to defend oneself from, even if I don’t condone legitimising it by doing so) without endorsing Trump or the Republicans more broadly.
I don't see how "10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned" is in any way accurate, nor can I see any realistic basis for believing that Trump's pick for the role will support consistent or transparent anti-trust measures, given the extreme levels of cronyism and corruption in his campaign and previous administration.
I've got strong feelings on this one that go far beyond just a single tweet from a random CEO, and frankly I wouldn't even bother trying to discuss this elsewhere, but since we're on Tildes and I've got a bit more baseline faith in the people here I'd be genuinely interested in your thoughts on that wider context?
[Edit] Clarity
I switched to fastmail from proton a few years ago because the UX was better. They’re not as privacy centric, but being the customer rather than the product is good enough for me.
fastmail is typically the recommendation for paid e-mail services. I run my own e-mail, but if I didn't I have the notion in the back of my mind that fastmail is the service I should look into.
Proton is pretty good for easy to create but still generally "trusted" anonymous/disposable e-mail addresses though!
I cancelled. I had auto-renewed earlier this year but was fortunately within the eligible window. I missed the original discussions on this but, after it hit the front page of reddit, it was a major topic at my workplace yesterday. I considered the deleted posts, the social media apology tour, and the official messaging. I ultimately decided that the sum of all the parts gave me enough pause to consider other options. There are many good suggestions in this thread and I encourage anyone reconsidering to check them out. Luckily for me, only the VPN and mail services were useful so I have a bit less to migrate than others
I left PIA for Proton after the Kape acquisition. At that time, it felt similar - a company with whom I had a fair amount of trust did something that made me question their ability to provide the same amount of security going forward. The simple truth is that the VPN market has several legitimate players and it seems unwise for leadership to take stances that might cause users to question their dedication to privacy.
I know some have had issues but cancelling was relatively pain free. I used both the web form and email to start the process and got a response within 24 hours. As expected, the CSA tried to retain me by mentioning that Andy Yen did not specifically endorse Trump and by highlighting the parts of Swiss law that prevent them from complying with subpoenas.