this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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You're probably downvoted and insulted because you made up a narrative. He straight up said Republicans were the party of privacy, and were shilling them. The backtracking 'Oh I was just supporting the pick' was Proton's PR company coming later, after nuking a significant number of reddit posts from andy yen doubling down, as well as iirc the entire mastodon thread where he was doing the same. It was wild as fuck to watch in real time, we were literally joking in discord that some poor intern was probably trying to physically wrestle the keyboard away from Yen while screaming for someone to call their PR company.
That whole fiasco is literally why Proton no longer uses mastodon, because no one there let them forget the whole thing despite attempts at nuking the posts from existence.
This isn't the first time proton, and andy yen specifically, has shown a troubling tendency towards supporting fascism. Vibe coding their apps is also a big warning flag just from a security point of view as well.
I've still been hesitantly recommending proton VPN to my friends, because a questionable VPN is better than no VPN, and most people aren't willing to shill out money for... well, mullvad used to be what I recommended if they were willing to pay for it, but I guess I'll have to rethink that now. But yeah, it was, to my knowledge, the best free VPN, though that's a low bar.
You got a source for that?
Well, there's his literal original post on X, praising republicans as the party of privacy against big tech: https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660 When people lost their shit, he went on reddit and posted an 'official proton response', doubling down: https://archive.ph/quYyb (archive link because proton PR eventually came in start deleting things and creating a new narrative)
When that was deleted, proton claimed it 'wasn't actually an official response' despite being on the official proton account and literally saying 'proton's official response is', and a shitload of now-deleted doubling down in the thread that I don't currently have time to find, but you can probably see them in the thread by looking for the outraged responses to deleted posts (or finding whatever the current deleted-reddit-mirror is, I don't know the most up-to-date one atm). They then claimed they were 'politically neutral' despite that literally being impossible by dint of being pro-privacy, which isn't politically neutral at all. https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1i29k9t/proton_shouldnt_use_their_official_socials_to/m7csaky/
I don't have time to really dig in and find all the deleted reddit/mastodon posts for you, but they're still around because the internet is eternal, and deleting something only hides it from shmuchks who don't know better, so I'm sure you can find em.
Here, 2 are some now deleted Mastondon responses from Proton.