Proton Mail Says It’s “Politically Neutral” While Praising Republican Party
theintercept.com
The “privacy-first” company surprised its user base when CEO Andy Yen lauded Trump on social media.

Summary

Proton Mail, known for its privacy-first email services, faced backlash after CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party and its antitrust stance.

The company initially posted and deleted a statement supporting Yen’s comments, later claiming an “internal miscommunication” and reiterating its political neutrality.

Critics question Proton’s impartiality, particularly as it cooperates with Swiss authorities on legal data requests.

Privacy advocates warn that political alignments could undermine trust, especially for Proton’s users—journalists and activists wary of government surveillance under administrations like Trump’s.

  • PlainSimpleGarak@lemmings.world
    0·
    1 day ago

    Which is why this platform will never have a meaningful growth. But 90% of the user base is happy with that because they enjoy having their opinions validated and not challenged a.k.a. echo chamber.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      1 day ago

      Well, never say never. It happened once already, in June/July 2023 the userbase grew more than 10x.

      And we have seen a nice bump of 2k users in the past week or so as the fediverse has gotten some publicity. Reddit is not an option so we have no choice but to try to make Lemmy better, and I genuinely believe that the federated, decentralized concept can be the solution in so many ways.

      Piefed and Kbin are also huge boons to our chances of success. Lemmy may not ever take off, but I expect one of the fediverse content aggregators eventually will. Reddit is simply too shitty of a user experience, they are guaranteed to fail.

      • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        1 day ago

        That other site is the 6th most visited website in the world, so clearly having upvotes/downvotes doesn’t preclude growth.

        Does mbin only have upvotes or am I misremembering? And boosts I guess. That’s not my personal preference but the beauty is we can still access the same content from different platforms.

        • warm@kbin.earth
          0·
          20 hours ago

          I was responding more to the echo chamber part, which is what a karma system causes pretty quickly. Obviously likes and dislikes arent stopping growth.