Proton

Fact check time!

He praised trump for appointing someone into a role who is a big tech sceptic.

Actually, no. See, she spent some time doing that, then left the FTC in 2014 to join the Internet Association, which is a big tech lobby group involving Google/Amazon/Facebook/eBay/etc. She was the vice-president, then later General Consel. While she was there, she helped spearhead the opposition to a California data privacy bill that would have required internet service providers to gasp obtain customer permission to collect and sell their browsing history. So basically, if you cherry pick her early career, sure, she's skeptical of big tech... but if you actually look closer she pivoted later in life to become a big tech advocate/lobbyist that is strictly against privacy.

However the issue is he then went on to make a broad generalisation about the republicans being the party of fhe people and the democrats being by the party of big business. Someone from proton doubled down on the assertion on social media.

Several people from proton doubled down on that (blatantly and hilariously) false assertion on social media, several times, over several days, at one point even stating that it was Proton's official stance. (That message was later deleted, and they tried to pretend it never happened, until proof was given. The pretending was then also deleted.

That has caused offence in a era when US politics is extremely polarised and divided. The attitude is “if you’re for the other team, you’re the enemy”. But also people are angry at the company having an apparently right wing political stance.

That's a very passive voice you have going on there. You could write for US major media with that kind of skill.

The fact is, right now we have a political party that is illegally rummaging through our personal information using unelected goons who literally stormed federal buildings and guerilla-installed unsecured personal servers to siphon off the data. If you think that shouldn't 'polarize' people, especially when the point of gathering that information is to send innocent people to actual literal Guantanamo Bay, you've outed yourself. A right wing political stance in the US is, right now, a stance of being against privacy, against rights, and against due process. None of which are things the CEO of a privacy company should be.

Personally I think this is overblown. I think its reasonable to be happy if someone anti big tech is appointed, but the broad sweeping comments about the parties was ill judged. However they have backed away from this position and made clear that proton in politically neutral.

This is a VERY generous interpretation, followed immediately by blatant lies. They never backed away from this position- they doubled down on it over and over again, trying to justify themselves in front of waves of evidence otherwise. When the evidence grew too great, they simply stopped making statements and tried to pretend it didn't exist and never happened.

As for the absolutely absurd lie that proton is politically neutral, privacy is never politically neutral. Frankly, trying to pretend it's politically neutral is a giant red flag. While it SHOULD be politically neutral, it is not. A privacy-focused company should very much be in favor of political advancements towards privacy and personal freedoms, which IS a stance.

I see this as bad PR and on the spectrum of someone saying something stupid on twitter and then regretting it, but some people are treating it as an existenial threat for proton and a huge red flag.

If 9 Republicans are at a table talking, and Andy Yen sits down at the table to chat with them, how many Republicans are at the table?