For one, Gail Slater was only ‘tough on big tech’ for a few years in the very beginning of her career, and the entire rest of it has been spent as a big tech lobbyist for Internet Association. The most relevant lobbying being the opposition of a california data privacy bill that would require ISPs to gain customer permissions to collect and sell their browsing history. Needless to say, it’s pretty horrifying to hear a privacy company CEO call a noted anti-privacy lobbyist a good pick with those ‘credentials’.

Only two of Andy Yen’s posts regarding the matter are shown or referred to- the original post, and a later ‘clarification’. Every double-down, the ‘official’ statement he (supposedly erroneously) made, the deleted posts, all of those are not mentioned, yet the author spends a lot of time claiming that they went through ‘thousands of tweets and replies’ to find everything relevant, which in my opinion is gaslighty as hell when he then promptly discards all of them since they don’t match his narrative.

The biggest issue with the article though is that it makes a ton of assumptions presented as fact about Andy Yen’s motivations, which are then used as ‘evidence’ to discredit the evidence he’s pro-trump… and then assigns actions the entire Proton company did as justification for why Yen, himself as a person, is not pro-trump.

So the evidence he is NOT pro-trump is that the company he works for and doesn’t wholly control has done some some decent privacy stuff, and the proof that he IS pro-trump is either thrown away, not mentioned, or discard on the basis that ‘he totally said he wasn’t guys trust me.’

People keep posting this, like some kind of biased blog post on medium is supposed to be a gotcha moment that fixes everything. It doesn’t.

Proton’s CEO turned out to be a Trumper with a Nazi dogwhistle username and a lot of Republican buzzwords peppering his vocabulary. Lots of people are defending Proton anyway because of sunk cost fallacy… or they’re just Nazis themselves.

Unfortunately, several of the author’s conclusions are drawn from either errors or outright lies, or simply things being swept aside. Several of Andy’s later posts are ignored, as is the amount he doubled down. Him using the official proton accounts to call his statements the official proton stance is waved away. It basically only examines the cleaned up, shiny final version of events proton would like you to pretend happened after they deleted everything, instead of what actually happened. Worse, it pretends that was the only chain of events that happened. It’s straight up gaslighting.

It’s a very, very biased article that doesn’t even attempt to do any kind of deep analysis and just tries to justify its stance by cherry picking, instead of actually looking at the facts and coming to a conclusion from there.

Are you kidding me right now? You call a fascist takeover a bit of “dissent” that we need to “relax a little” about?

You think the CEO of a privacy company coming out in support of a dictator who wants to erode rights and abolish privacy laws, and believes in jailing dissenters, to not have gone rogue?

We literally have American citizens being sent to an offshore military concentration camp so their lawful rights can be waived, and you think that’s okay?!

A massive, massive astroturfing campaign Epic Games paid for in hopes of tarnishing Valve and Gabe Newell’s reputation to try and bolster their failure of a shop ecosystem.

Unfortunately, it worked, because there are people on the net who don’t remember the and days before steam, or even the initial versions of steam that people had Actual problems with, and not just made up ones.

Because it needs to be said and hasn’t yet- you’re a good person. The United States needs more people like you.

The other thing they forgot to mention is that getting Amazon to actually tell you what anything will cost, or a breakdown of what your bill is, is like pulling teeth.

This picture has been around way, waaaat before ai was ever a thing.