I decided to waste my fucking time and read the awful medium article that keeps getting linked and, boy fucking howdy, it’s exactly what I thought it was. let’s start with the conclusion first:

TLDR: my conclusion is that it is far more likely that Proton and its CEO are actually liberals.

which is just a really weird thing to treat like a revelation when we’ve very recently seen a ton of liberal CEOs implement fash policies, including one (Zuckerberg) who briefly considered running as a Democrat before he was advised that nobody found him the least bit appealing

anyway, let’s go to the quick bullet points this piece of shit deserves:

• it’s posted by an account that hasn’t done anything else on medium
• the entire thing is written like stealth PR and a bunch of points are copied straight out of Proton’s marketing. in fact, the tone and structure are so off that I’m just barely not willing to accuse this article of being generated by an LLM, because it’s just barely not repetitive enough to entirely read like AI
• they keep doing the “nobody (especially the filthy redditors) read Andy or Proton’s actual posts in full” rhetorical technique, which is very funny when people on mastodon were frantically linking archives of those posts after they got deleted, and the posts on Reddit were deleted in a way that was designed to provoke confusion and cover Proton’s tracks. I can’t blame anyone for going on word of mouth if they couldn’t find an archive link.
• like every liberal-presenting CEO turned shithead, Andy has previously donated a lot of money to organizations associated with the Democrats
• not a single word about how Proton’s tied up in bitcoin or boosting LLMs and where that places them politically
• also nothing about how powerless the non-profit associated with Proton is in practice
• Andy can’t be a shithead, he hired a small handful of feminists and occasionally tweets about how much he supports left-wing causes! you know, on the nazi site
• e: “However, within the context of Trump’s original post that Andy is quoting, it seems more likely that “big business” = Big Tech, and “little guys” = Little Tech, but this is not obvious if you did not see the original post, and this therefore caused outrage online.” what does this mean. that’s exactly the context I read into Andy’s original post, and it’s a fucking ridiculous thing to say and a massive techfash dogwhistle loud and shrill enough that everybody heard it. it’s fucking weird to falsely claim you’re being misinterpreted and then give an explanation that’s completely in line with the damning shit you’re being accused of, then for someone else to come along and pretend that somehow absolves you

there’s more in there but I’m tired of reading this article, the writing style really is fucking exhausting

e: also can someone tell me how shit like this can persuade anyone? it’s one of the most obvious, least persuasive puff pieces I’ve ever read. did the people who love proton more than they love privacy need something, anything to latch onto to justify how much they like the product?

after Proton’s latest PR push to paint their CEO as absolutely not a fascist failed to convince much of anyone (feat. a medium article I’m not gonna read cause it’s a waste of my time getting spread around by brand new accounts who mostly only seem to post about how much they like Proton), they decided to quietly bow out of mastodon and switch to the much more private and secure platform of… fucking Reddit of all things, where Proton can moderate critical comments out of existence (unfun fact: in spite of what most redditors believe, there’s no rule against companies moderating their own subs — it’s an etiquete violation, meaning nobody gives a fuck) and accounts that only post in defense of Proton won’t stick out like a sore thumb