Racist co-founder. Let’s just start calling a spade a spade. He’s a racist.
“donation”? this is called lobbying. And it should be illegal.
If it was illegal to donate money, these money would still reach the recipients - but without anyone’s knowledge.
Sounds like a seriously bad argument against laws…
“You’re saying I can only murder people in secret? I thought this was America.”
All private financing of political parties and politicians everywhere must stop.
Just as religion and state must be separated so must politics and money. If you hold more than $10 million in assets you don’t get to influence politics. It’s one or the other, not both.
Its the last remnant of the various property owning/landed gentry/aristocracy control of government. They had to give up their exclusive right to sit in court and then “democratic” government, and then their exclusive right to vote.
They are holding on to money-as-influence, trying to convince us its fair because everyone can make donations (you get a great tax receipt!!). However, even donation limits are mainly just a way to cover up their thumbs on the scale, because all they require the rich to do is spread out their money.
Giving tax money so politicans can market themselves needs to stop. We all here understand how crowdfunding works, it would work just as well with political parties.
The funding they receive from their own members should be enough.
The state financing parties is pretty valid and is practiced in many countries.
For example in Germany parties get paid around 1 € per vote received in elections.
millions in assets
Rich people and corporations will always be able to use their money to influence politics towards their interests.
Influencing politics works in other ways besides direct donations. The rich can put money into:
- media
- interest groups
- education
- studies
- events
- scholarships
- NGOs
Influencing voters to support your desired policies works well.
Then there’s of course the promise of investments, if policies are changed to your interests. In the simplest case this is a local government changing zoning, building infrastructure, softening environmental or noise regulations in order to for an investor to build a factory. This in turn brings money, employment, and tax revenue to the local government.
Instead of direct donations, a politician can be hired to give a speech somewhere.
Or less directly, hire the politician’s child into a well paying position.
Promising a politician a well paid job for their time outside government is of course also a popular way.
Of course you can regulate all of that in various ways to make it more difficult or at least more transparent.
i mean, that’s not quite how it worked for me. politics (at least the kind i did) is basically getting the people with $10 million or more in assets to donate to and get involved with their communities. we had to trade some favors (there are a few musicians on the board who lend their services for such instances. most of the time it was that, once or twice it was “teach my fuckup kid how to work”), but we got funding for homelessness services.
if we couldn’t trade those favors, we wouldn’t have any homeless shelters in my county. they ran off grants mostly (during democrat administrations. during republican administrations, we ran off hope and loan forgiveness), but they can’t expand without extraordinary help. which unfortunately takes politicking (which i hate, but they wanted me doing it)
Then your state is not capable of taxing those with money to extract the value it needs to run said country…
Why do we need private money to fix public things because the politic-people can’t be bothered to look anywhere but the next donation goal.
This isnt a donation but a “Pretty please, pay me a standard contractor rate in the disguise of a ‘donation’”.Man I hate this illusionary and superficial bullshit
the taxes weren’t changing, but the grants dried up. yet you blame the taxes.
it’s like you’re a one trick pony. figure out some other thing to harp on
Would be fun to know who’s sponsoring this smear campaign. After all, Mullvad has been stepping on many toes with their pro-privacy advocacy and enablement. I’d put my money on some combination of Thorn, Palantir, and whatever other surveillance capitalism corpos there are who’d benefit from less protected populace, both in policy and technology…
Why do you think it’s a smear campaign? Did he not donate?
Because (at least on lemmy) they spam articles about this, and treat it like some “gotcha” moment that would make the company no longer able to fulfill their purpose.
One of the owners investing in a political party should not be this big of a deal, and the articles provided are clearly made to put suspicion on not only Mullvad but also on ÖP.
The campaign is actually more about positioning ÖP as some sort of “far-right”-party by the now left, because they are afraid to lose votes to them. They also of course wants to make it “shameable” for people to donate to this party so they cannot possibly win some votes this election.
Because (at least on lemmy) they spam articles about this, and treat it like some “gotcha” moment that would make the company no longer able to fulfill their purpose.
Because more militant left leaning views are pretty common here. Seems to be the Occam’s Razor answer.
Yes of course, it is to me just clear that it is not about Mullvad. The post are about ÖP.
To what end? Surely locals would have a better idea of exactly where their politics stand… what’s the point in giving a false impression to people from random countries on the Internet?
So people are mostly driven of “what is popular”, so if you spam the article and astroturf them. You give the illusion that it is a big problem that a lot of people care about. And that leads to people taking it more seriously.
So the end here is to make people who would leave the left-party (Vänsterpartiet) to vote for ÖP, feel alienated. “Oh my god, I can’t vote for a far right party! I better vote for the ‘only’ left party that is left.” is the thought they want them to have.
I guess I’m just skeptical this false impression will work on locals… I’d presume they aren’t hearing from this group from lemmy mainly and likely already have feelings established, no? It just seems to me this wouldn’t be a good forum on which to spread misinformation… strikes me as a lot more likely that a forum known for being pretty left leaning is just latching onto a story that is related to their interest.
Well you can check the comments, and their mastodon page. It works.
The second aspect is that they want to hurt Mullvad as a deterent for other to donate to ÖP, I think that is why they go extra hard on mastodon and lemmy. Because a lot of people who would be interested in Mullvads products would be here.
I want to know if money I’m paying a company is directly contributing to fascists. According to Wikipedia,
Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues.
Nationalism is a Key Smell of fascism.
Nationalism is a big part of leftist parties also, fascists does not have claim on that within itself.
Also as I have written in previous posts what ÖP is calling for is already part of the government today, and in a Swedish context means that migrants are given help if they VOLUNTARILY wants to leave.
https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2025/10/ett-kraftigt-hojt-atervandringsbidrag/
Yes I checked the English wikipedia page, however the Swedish one makes no claims that ÖP would like to close the borders to migration. So I would urge to either check the parties own website about what they want or do a quick search. Clearly some bad actors have edited the page to put some views they have not voiced there.
The only source I find that says that “closed borders” are something they want, is flamman.se (what a suprise /s).
I don’t think you need a targeted campaign for that… give some of the
lunaticsextremistsleft leaning lemmy folks only the slightest hint that some service may not pass the purity testing and they will jump on it like a fly on a big pile of shit.Yes of course, it is to me just clear that it is not about Mullvad. The post are about ÖP.
ffs - first Proton, now this.
I’ve never liked the idea that I have to trust my VPN, and this news raises a pretty significant trust issue. Makes me think I’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle.
Anyone have experience with the TOR daemon?
I’ve been looking at TOR, I2P, Reticulim, Freenet, Snowflake, IPFS
Tor get’s blocked a lot. It’s the fastest of the options. The level of anonymization is ok. If you piss off a nation-state, it may not protect you sufficiently. It’s had a history of leaks, If an intelligence ag owns enough of the exits, timing attacks might out you.
I2P is more secure, harder to block, but it’s really slow and has very limited access to the clearnet. It’s also super easy to DDOS. There are some torrents, forums and chatrooms out there on i2p, latency is rough.
Reticulum is pretty cool. It’s a protocol and you access things like nomad net on it. It’s crypto is good, there’s no clearnet access. It may have issues when/if it scales
Snowflake is slow AF, mainly used to get anonymous access out from restricted nations-states.
IPFS web3 crypto storage. you can host files/sites on it. It’s kinda hard to make stuff on there go away, it’s also kinda hard to get stuff to stay. If you’re not paying a pinning service, even daily scripting the pins to keep data up there is a losing battle. It’s slow, fragile, not very anonymous.
This is way worse than what Yen did. This guy donated a lot of money to a party that explicitly pushes demigration policies, and if there was any doubt that this was a motivating factor for the donation, he later said he felt those policies were necessary. That’s understandable to not want to give your money to someone who you know is going to go bankroll demigration politics with some of your money.
Yen praised the Republicans at large over an anti trust pick.
I think the other criticisms of Proton’s policy changes are valid, and everyone has different standards for what is enough to divest from a company I guess, but I’ve heard people calling Yen a fascist sympathizer for that statement, and that’s just divorced from reality imo.
The party is “pushing” for something that is already law. Re-migration, at least in a Swedish context, aims to let people VOLUNTARILY return to their home country but with the intensive to get some cash to start up their new lifes there.
Sources…
https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2025/10/ett-kraftigt-hojt-atervandringsbidrag
Totally already legal to cross corpses to remove the “fake Swedes.” Sweden is for Swedes after all.
https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut
Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
“I’m prepared to cross corpses,” he said.One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to “Sweden is the country of Swedes”.
In a section of Yoshi’s Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to “go over corpses” to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. “It’s not going to be pretty to send these people home,” he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.
He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There’s a difference. It’s a qualitative difference," Allard said.
Yes soo the article you sent now has more info, and more to grab at. I don’t know why fria tider made him sound way more harsh that he actually is in the interview. But if you check the clip they have linked he is clearly talking about people who does not want to be part of Swedish society and/or criminals. I do not feel that it is a fascist view to want to throw out non-citizens that commit crimes.
In many if not all countries in Europe this has been standard since like, forever. There is no logical reason why you should keep criminals within your borders.
I still wouldn’t support it and would probably pull my money from someone who is actively promoting it. Often this kind of sentiment is a soft pedaled version of more ugly policies, and I just don’t agree with it in the first place. I think nationalism is generally an ignorant position and the lesson of the 20th century should be that trying to maintain homogeneous states nearly always leads to genocide in the worst cases and apartheid states in the best of times. So this doesn’t assuage me much.
That said, extra context is always welcome.
You are of course free to do what you want with your money! :)
Nationalism is about believing and wanting the concepts of nations/borders. And with that the analysis of the ethnicities within or outside those borders (by ethnicity I mean cultural not race), and that a nation should be a collection of people that work together to make that nation better. So blaming apartheid and genocide, is like blaming a hammer because it can be used to kill someone.
Perhaps, but one could argue it happens so often that the hammer lends itself to hammering this particular nail, and so often devolves into that. The Balkans are this experiment played out, attempting to carve out ethno states, and we’ve seen how that’s gone. Once you start saying things like “this country should only be (or primarily be) for X people”, you almost necessarily have to engage in some degree of genocide (in the wider sense of removing a people and culture that doesn’t fit the paradigm), or apartheid, otherwise the statement ends up a bit vacuous, no?
Israel is, in my view, a very clear example of this; once you’ve decided “this is a Jewish state”, anyone not Jewish by definition become second class citizens.
If we’re just talking general assimilation, that’s more nuanced… I don’t oppose calls for more assimilation, but I think governments have done a very poor job in using more stick than carrot. They tend to not put any effort in helping people integrate, which is, from experience, very difficult. One could argue it isn’t their responsibility, but I think such framings for state action is silly… either the state has an interest in a thing being done or it doesn’t, and in this case I think they very much do. Most immigrants that form insular communities do so not out of any inherent pull to, but because they’re already being somewhat ostracized. In the US, Chinatowns arose as a direct result of ostracization and discrimination.
I do think there is a danger of assimilation programs overzealously wiping out culture… the Sami have faced multiple attempts in the past at trying to stamp out their culture, the US and Australia religiously forced the elimination of many native cultures in the name of assimilation. It is also a fine line to walk. But there is undoubtedly a state interest (and immigrant interest!) in assimilating into society.
I’d argue the binding culture that should be assimilated shouldn’t be things as fuzzy as ethnicity… the culture that binds should be the values of that nation. Which doesn’t really have anything to do with ethnicity.
I’m out of the loop. What happened with proton?
Public statements of support from its CEO for a regime actively weaponizing technology to build a mass-surveillance state.
Removing its no logging policy after being compelled by court order to log and disclose a user’s IP and browser fingerprint.
Personally, I gave up on Proton after they amended their TOS to include a mandatory arbitration clause, including a ban on class action lawsuits. IMO only the dirtiest of corporations rely on mandatory arbitration clauses. Without the spectre of a class action lawsuit, if a VPN were to get caught breaking its promises to its users, the only real damage the company would likely suffer would be reputational. These are for-profit corporations. The only way we can hold them accountable is to put their profits at risk.
edit: looks like @oce beat me to it
I do wonder what could they have done in the email case? I don’t think that there’s any country where they could just let you not comply with a court order. And due to how email works they can’t just encrypt the subject lines or the sender/receiver.
In that one case I lean more into pointing more fingers to the Swiss government, rather than to proton. They’re still not blameless tho, maybe they could have used some sort of canary to let people know they were being surveilled, and be more clear on how to avoid these situations.Don’t log it, you can’t be compelled to hand over data you don’t have. They said outright that they didn’t log it.
Run SMTP purely on IO sockets. Don’t make files. You draft your email into your own cryptographically secure blob, When it’s time to send it, you fire it through an SMTP daemon built to use memory only, once it’s gone it’s gone. If the govt wants that data, they can go to the ISP for it. Maybe it communicates securely with SMTP servers set up in countries that are actually good at observing privacy.
Good Guy security provider could also terminate your account or lose your password.
The thing is, they oversold their security. They’re STILL overselling their security. The release rabid PR dogs / Trolls out there to discount/discredit people bitching about the situation.
Alternatives to proton
https://www.xda-developers.com/replaced-entire-proton-subscription-with-free-private-apps/
Thank you.
That is very disappointing. Time to find a good alternative
Yet another certified bruh moment
“I like this burger made by fascists. I’m going to keep eating this burger, I don’t care where it came from or where my money buying the burger goes to.”
So many comments here sound like this, geez. Same people saying “we can be friends, can’t we, even if our politics differ?” Morality and respecting humans isn’t politics. And no. We can’t.
Also, yes, enforcing racial and national purity (remigration) is, in fact, fascist ideology. Get over it. It’s not extreme, it’s calling a spade a spade. https://lemmy.zip/comment/27359847
The irony of these holier-than-thou lemmy folks using a term like “calling a spade a spade”
“be 100% pure, organic, free-range, antifascist like me, otherwise we cant be friends or have discussions at all!!!”
Hey just FYI you wouldn’t be saying any of this unless you knew about the donation. What grocery store do you shop at?
Farmers markets and some local shops we have around us.
i mean, while there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, why does it seem like so many people are trying their hardest to rack up the most unethical consumption? Like there’s a counter somewhere or something idk.
that was rhetorical, i know why. fucking cern weasels.
Then do something by promoting alternatives, stop being lazy
https://www.xda-developers.com/replaced-entire-proton-subscription-with-free-private-apps/
You’re absoluetly right, and thank you, I’ll be using that link in my personal life.
As for VPN alternatives, as we know, not many have faced a raid by authorities like Mullvad, which does speak to the fact that they weren’t collecting user data. However, that may be only a matter of time in our increasingly surveiled world -
ProtonVPN - has its own controversies (CEO may be right-wing in supporting Republicans in the US) but has stood up to legal action previously
And, while potentially biased, there is a google doc users from reddit made to compare many of the options listed here and more.
Also it’s a damn VPN. Pick another one. It’s not even like they can use the excuse that it’s the best in the field (still not an excuse but loads better than, I just “like” it)
A very small percentage of vpns can be classed as decent, especially if you are in the southern hemisphere. I requested my refund from mullvad today, my replacement option is?
AirVPN and IVPN are both fine. I don’t know why your hemisphere should matter aside from straight up being blocked so kind of hard for me to recommend without knowing that.
Which one? The Pro-Israel vpn at PIA? The one thats Pro-Trump at ProtonVPN? NordVPN?
AirVPN and IVPN are both great options.
The other respectable option besides mullvad is ivpn
AirVPN seems to be the go-to for torrenting, and RiseUp exists but I don’t know how good it is
Air VPN was good for torrenting for years but most of the servers in torrent friendly countries are pretty full and slow these days.
I had them from 2020 until last fall. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of good options if you want port forwarding.
There is no middle ground to be had with Nazis. It’s us or them. If the Nazi won’t leave Mullvad, then I will leave as a customer. Simple as
Where are the nazis? Are you talking about the leninist party ÖP as nazis?
I think that is the modern use of the word “Nazi”, best translated with “i don’t like them”
Yes, but this is super dangerous. I have seen young boys in my politcal party (liberal conservative) basically stand guard for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_clubs because “well the left calls everything nazi, including us. So these guys probably wants the same as us. And we on the right needs to stand together.”
Ironically rhetoric like this is in fact normalizing the word nazi, and has more become a word to describe a group that the left doesn’t like. Rather than a fascist leaning party.
“I don’t like co-owning a nazi bar.” Well, boohoo, grow a spine and do something about it.
lol. Yes.
I will sign up for Mullvad tomorrow if he actually does something meaningful about it.
I haven’t even looked up the price, but I’ll keep my word.
Only I won’t have to, because the odds are this guy is another spineless piece of shit.
It only benefits Mullvad if I walk away right now. I’ve got ~200 days left on my prepaid account. Hopefully in the next 200 days i’ll find a better or equivalent VPN service with CEOs that have yet to come out as complete shit-bags.
I believe they said they would offer refunds if that’s what you’re referring to by the 200 days
https://piunikaweb.com/2026/06/30/mullvad-browser-vpn-options-after-controversy/
Wikipedia - is as always - doing a great job at gathering info and they wrote down what the party’s policies are.
IMHO what they propose makes no sense:
- (Massively) cut taxes
- Reimmigration
- Reduce the normal work week by 25%
How is that economy supposed to work? Where do you get the money from to finance this? Who should offset the missing work?
A $500k donation can bankroll your party for some time but certainly not an entire country…
They are chasing votes from self absorbed people, it has always been a thing, but more people are getting into the scam globally now.
Energy & Fuel policy
In 2025 the leader of the Örebro Party, Markus Allard, in a post on X wrote that he wished to see a complete elimination of taxes on energy & fuel.[48] Allard once again said that this was a priority for the Örebro Party in an X-post in 2026.[49] As taxes on energy and fuel make up 40 to 50% of the price in Sweden, abolishing them would lead to the prices being significantly decreased.
Again, never a path of substance to make this happen. This is how this spreads. It always sounds great in quips but no actual policy substance to get it across the line.
who should offset the missing work
I don’t know about the rest of your questions, but generally there wont be much missing work. Unemployment is rising thanks to automation and AI, and a lot of work is bullshit busy-work anyway.
With a lot of upheaval and confusion in the interim, I truly believe we could cut working hours by 50% and still be basically fine.
You can’t cut working hours if you get rid of all the immigrants doing the “busy-work”.
It depends on what kind of work it is of course. But a large portion of jobs don’t see a reduction in productivity because people don’t really work 8h efficiently. Some see productivity increases. In combination with better well being, less sick days etc. it can be done.
Saying he ‘made a donation’ is downplaying his role. It makes it sound like he’s just some guy doing what everyone else does to participate in politics…
The 2025 donation accounted for 72% of the party’s total income last year. … According to data collected by DonationWatch, 2025 was the most lucrative year in the party’s history, netting a total of 5.58 million SEK. For comparison, the party received just 202,000 SEK in total donations throughout 2024.
Just the annual interest on his donation is more that all of their other donations for the entire year combined.
He didn’t just make a donation, he is practically their sole source of financing.
Oh shit, that has got to be the poorest political party I’ve heard of 🤣
Bankrupt morally and financially 🤷♂️
The emigration stuff makes the rest of their positions so confusing.
The leader was allegedly kicked out of the left party for liking anti fascists on Facebook, and they want free preschool, 30 hour work weeks, and a bunch of other social things.
But then the remigration bullshit. Dumb.
It’s basically just one really annoying dude stirring up shit in the municipal politics of Örebro.
Make no mistake, he’s a massive piece of shit still
It seems quite small indeed
Their colors are literally red, black and white 😭
Did noone tell them they can just apply for funding in russia?
I mean, yeah they are a shit party, but isn’t smaller and local parties kinda what we want? I’d rather have a 20 small parties in parliament than 2 big ones with some on the side lines.
This is like saying sure he murdered the guy with his bare hands, but doesn’t society need more face to face human interaction?
No, I just don’t think the size of the party is the thing we should criticise/make fun of it for. They’re clearly influential enough to snap up a big sponsor, and will now decide to actually try and run for parliament. UKIP was never large enough to get elected into parliament afaik, but they still managed to influence politics enough to cause brexit.
These small parties are not up for a parliamentary position though. They are only active in their municipality. There are 8 parties in the Swedish parliament (though it looks like it’s going to be 7 after the election in fall).
You’re forgetting the 12% exception, but they’d probably need an even larger amount than that.
I’m not following the polls at all. Who is falling out, the liberals?
Hah, yeah. They are at ~2% or so (with 4% being the minimum needed to get seats)
Damn. I can’t recall when they didn’t make the bar last.
I mean it is funny - the incest bit I mean - but it kind of epitomises why I don’t really follow politics anymore. Our leaders aren’t serious, and for the past few decades it’s devolved into a spectacle. It stresses me the fuck out.
The past week I’ve lived with my windows wide open, so I need to take particular care that I don’t just… tip out of them. Our idiot politics don’t help in that regard.
5,58 million SEK is around 600 thousand dollars. 202 thousand SEK is slightly more than 20 thousand dollars.
I’m tired boss……
Just when you think you find good companies to support they end up being run by shitbags.
Ok, where to next for my VPN needs?
I highly doubt you’ll find any company composed solely of people that support ideologies you agree with. I know that sounds flippant and dismissive but ultimately we should support the best options we have. Or I guess you can roll your own solution and trust that you have the skills to stay ahead of the opposition.
I agree, but there’s a difference between simply differing opinion and dumping a boat load of money, presumably some of it from Mullvad subscriptions, into a party that advocates for “remigration”. If the dude just had some weird opinions I wouldn’t necessarily switch, but I don’t like the idea of my money directly helping with helping the far right. Honestly, I wouldn’t even remotely care enough if one of the founders was part of a “normal” European neoliberal or conservative party, I have plenty of friends across the political spectrum. But I don’t like giving extremists my momey
There’s a big difference between a CEO that openly hates unions and has affairs or a software developer making 100k a year that makes racist AF on Facebook vs a CEO that’s literally keeping a bunch of Nazis afloat and giving them an outsized voice.
Also, there’s no best option when it comes to Nazis because if you give them an inch, they’ll subvert democracy and human decency.
Not using a VPN feeds other companies valuable data. Or are you suggesting we all become hermits on public land?
What info?
If you encryption & use DoH for DNS resolution, they can see the IPs you are connecting to, yes a sufficiently motivated ISP can use reverse DNS lookups to tell what sites you are accessing, but if you’re ISP is that bad, find a new one.
do you trust your ISP or some guy that donated to political parties that want to kick out immigrants more?
There are many parts of the world where the ISPs really are that bad, and consumers don’t have the choice to switch to a competitor that isn’t equally bad.
Switch to what, starlink? Because that’s the only other option for the majority of rural America. You think this issue, Elon musk, or my Trump ass kissing aligned isp is the lesser evil?
Sometimes a VPN is more trustworthy, it’s just wild that people think they are always better, giving money to the main guy funding a far-right party or Comcast, seems like an easy call.
Everything you see, use, touch, eat every day has been made possible by capitalism. If not for capitalism, we’d all still be farming and dying by 40.
yeeaah it’s all thanks to the feudalism 2.0 that we live in. long live the parasitic bourgeoisie. life is absolutely perfect nothing to see here
fucking lol
Well that comment wins my Billy Madison comment of the day.
We’d be dying ethically, though! I’m kidding. Did you not know this place is an extreme-left echo chamber?
not really extreme left tbh, thats .ml hexbear and grad.
I don’t know what those are - I just waded into Lemmy on a very large instance but I constantly see large numbers of people who proceed as if we’re all in agreement that capitalism is a proven evil and should definitely be put behind us in favor of a Marxist economy. This is what I consider extreme left. Now is it the uttermost tip of extreme? Surely not. But literal communism is not moderate left, or center left, it is far left. We could probably argue over the semantics of this for a long time.
Not using a VPN feeds other companies valuable data. Or are you suggesting we all become hermits on public land?
I guess there is a difference between the founder being a shit head and one of the rank and file being a shit head. Would be nice if just a few of the CEO class weren’t psychopaths.
In particular, privacy-oriented services seem to occupy an amoral zone. Probably because if you’re truly going to deliver on privacy promises, you have to be okay with giving them to everybody, including nefarious people doing bad things with them.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely ", unfortunately. I heard that studies have shown the neurophysiology of a person changes the longer they are in power and influence.
That’s interesting, but did they control for becoming a raging K-head?
There is no such thing as an ethical corporation. I’m going to tell you now, if you cannot ever compromise then learn subsistence farming as soon as you can.
You don’t have to agree with the chef in politics to enjoy their food.
Acting like that zealously would make you quickly run out of options if you actually talked to most chefs.
There’s a difference between a chef having an opinion and a high-ranking decision maker having an opinion and the money to amplify it.
If the chef thinks he shouldn’t have to make food for immigrants, that’s too bad. He’ll have to do his job anyway. If the CEO thinks his establishment shouldn’t serve immigrants and donates to politicians that promise to let him segregate his diner, that might actually have an impact far greater than the chef’s opinion.
It’s more a question of “know where your money is going.” You can stick your head in the sand and pretend not to know if you wish, but don’t presume to lecture others who won’t.
And contributing money to shitbags allows them to keep funding terrible values. See Musk.
True but the only thing these fuckers understand the minus to their wallet.
I think the response makes it obvious that a company is not it’s co-CEO, and a co-CEO is not a company.
Granted a tiny amount of your fees may make their way to a political party you vehemently oppose, but I think you’re also supporting a lot of other people in the organisation that are on your side.
It’s not a “tiny” amount of money, this dude is the CEO who makes all of the money in the company and any money going to Nazis is problematic especially when the Nazis in question are almost fully funded by this CEO and yes the CEO is the face and moral driver of a company.
Pretty ironic saying the company supports free speech when the biggest money maker is bankrolling a group that specifically gasses free speech and I doubt the other working there have even a sliver of speech that the CEO does.
Before your fee gets into a CEOs hands it pays for people’s salaries and the costs of the company. That’s what I mean by a tiny amount. It’s only what’s left after that that the CEO can benefit from.
Mullvad co-CEO Fredrik Strömberg confirmed that neither Mullvad VPN AB, its parent company Amagicom AB, nor its sister company Tillitis AB played any role in supporting the political party.
It doesn’t matter if the company itself was directly involved or not, the money came from the company, and from its’ customers.
A commonly known US analog is the Chik-Fil-A restaurant chain. They are proudly Christian and got tons of flak for donating to “traditional family” organizations that spread gay hate and so on.
They stopped, but the owner still personally donates. So every dollar you spend there still fuels those hate groups. It just takes a slightly different path.
So the question isn’t “is the company bad,” it’s “what is your money funding?”
I still call it Bigot Chicken to this day. My family who enjoys it is annoyed by me harping on the company’s general suckitude.
Too bad.
Funny thing about Chic Fil A is that unlike McDonald’s it’s not a BDS target
yeah it’s like saying Elon is only a piece of shit on his free time so it’s okay
edit:
pissof shitI’m not taking side here, but to be fair, Elon Musk is a shitty person doing shitty things both professionally and private. Mullvad VPN is at least only doing good things!
With that said. I have stopped using Mullvad VPN for now. We’ll see how this all plays out.
gonna get downvoted to hell here but making EVs and charging infrastructure is a good thing. also rooftop solar and batteries.
still, fuck nazi elon.
edit: this isn’t even about “credit” for developing the tech or whatever. even if we all agree this stuff was going to happen with or without elon, the Tesla business is still putting these products on the market. That is good, just like Mullvad and VPN. They didn’t invent VPN or anything, they are just one (good) provider.
The only issue with Tesla is that the quality of their cars is mediocre at best, while you’re paying premium, and that Tesla is the most childish and obstinate company to work with.
We have something called Råd & Rön’s Blacklist, which is respected Swedish consumer magazine’s list of products to avoid. Tesla is one of the brands that’s listed there. Partly because of the poor quality of the cars and partly because they don’t follow the rulings from the National Board for Consumer Complaints here in Sweden.
And they don’t give a **** about insurance companies either. If something happens to your Tesla, you’re on your own buying a new one yourself. You can forget about getting any sort of help from Tesla.
I stopped reading what you wrote after your first sentence. There are so many other issues than that with Tesla, what dimension are you from?
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow? What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla? I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well, and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
And what support do you expect to get regarding insurance? You can buy a bew car like anyone, can’t you?The cars since 2020 have been decent quality
https://www.adac.de/news/tuev-report-2026/
German source, since murica doesn’t have mandatory safety inspections. Literally no other car brand has a higher failure rate than Tesla, and the car with the highest failure rate was the Model Y, which released in 2022
Interesting. Seems that most the failures are the breaks because the pads get rusty with non-use because of the regenerative breaking. The Tesla manuals say to use the breaks fully every once in a while, but of course people don’t read the manual. And it just make then grunchy - they work fine. The suspension issues are real and I think the problem is that they start to go but it’s not obvious. Tesla will change them in warranty no problem but you have to notice the extra play and sounds, which is quite subtle. I wish we had annual safety inspections in Canada, they only do that for older cars.
The cars since 2020 have been decent quality. What you are paying for is an EV with good range and good power. Tesla definitely pushed the U.S. ev adoption ahead by a number of years.
I guess everything is relative. Tesla is still a crappy car in terms of quality here, with tons of unresolved issues with faulty cars that Tesla refused to help their customers with.
I’m curious about how that board works - is it a judicial system that other car manufacturers follow?
Råd & Rönis is an independent, non-profit consumer magazine owned by the Swedish Consumer Agency. Their funding comes from subscriptions and government grants (no advertising and no corporate money). They test products, expose bad companies and protect consumers. Their “Black List” (Svarta Listan) is highly influential, and being on it can destroy sales completely.
Customers can file a complaint at The National Board for Consumer Disputes (ARN), a government-run arbitration(?) service. Their decisions are not legally binding, but companies that ignore them get publicly shamed (and often blacklisted by Råd & Rön). Tesla has ignored basically every single case. Any remotely serious company here in Sweden comply with ARN. We take ARN very seriously here.
What kind of rulings have they made against Tesla?
Our law is equal for everyone. We don’t care if you’re some local dude selling hotdogs or Elon Musk selling Teslas.
I found that Tesla follows their own warranty quite well […]
That’s the issue. Their warranty basically means that they ignore you and will fuck you over, even if the issue is their own fault. People have ended up with repair costs close to what a new car costs, and even if it’s Teslas fault, they refuse to do shit.
[…] and after that I don’t think any a car manufacturers will fix stuff for free.
Of course they have to, if the issue is their own fault.
Sounds like a good system. But I guess it only works if people pay attention to the blacklist so it’s a good threat since it’s not enforceable. I haven’t heard of Tesla not honoring drivetrain issues under warranty here in Canada. They wouldn’t do a second windshield replacement on my wife’s T3 because what they said was evidence of a rock chip, but that was kinda fair.
Rooftop solar is definitely not something Musk can take any credit for.
EVs maybe, but charging infrastructure that he made proprietary rather than using the open standard is not especially worthy of praise.
Musk hasn’t done any of those things. People who are actually smart did them and then he pretended to do them.
I mean yeah, obviously. But Musk is very obviously excellent at marketing, and there’s an argument to be made that it was thanks to his marketing that Tesla became as popular as it did, and that that helped pull up the EV market more broadly.
Marketing from marketers that he hired. He did fuck all.
Not even EVs. The work was getting done by researchers improving electric motors and batteries. As soon as the technology was viable Elon jumped on it and marketed himself as the person behind it all. Same goes for PayPal which he stole credit for, rockets that people already worked decades on, tunnels that are just bad metros, and machine learning (AI) that people were already doing since the 70’s and only recently had breakthroughs because of the increased ability to feed it data en masse.
The only credit he should get is having the power and charisma to capitalize on the work of others. He’s a Thomas Edison and not a Nikola Tesla.
Calling him Thomas Edison is giving him far too much credit. Edison may have been a self aggrandizing asshole, but he also did have a few accomplishments to his name. Musk is a glorified venture capitalist, only instead of just taking a chunk of the profits he buys the whole company so he can steal credit for the company’s achievements. Elon Musk has never created a single thing in his life. He has in fact been a net negative as every company he has ever been involved with would have been better off without Musk’s “help”.
I mean, to be fair, it was the engineers and founders who have done a lot of the work. They deserve the credit for making good products. Not Elon. He just profits off of them and the labor of the engineers.
Elon Musk didn’t do any of that though. Engineers did.
Those things were happening before him and continue DESPITE him. If you get downvoted it’s because you insinuated he had anything to do with that.
He didnt make shit. He saw there was opportunity and ran with it, now that he has it sustainabikity is nowhere close to his goals.
The solar tiles suck The battery is a whitelabelled product The boring company was strategic interference to stop public infrastructure development.
Elon is just a propaganda machine (see his “in 4 or 5 years we’ll have datacenters in space” bullshit, or all the other things that he promised but it didn’t happen), a shame so many people fall for it.
It is very unfortunate that ev’s and elon are linked in any way, he is not positive marketing.
Yes, but I do not give Musk credit for recognizing a good thing and then taking it from Tesla’s founders.
Yeah but it’s not exactly the south African doing those things, if anything they are doing them despite him.
An issue for those of us in the southern hemisphere, where mullvad is the only decent choice… but one of their founders is clearly not decent.
Mullvad VPN is popularizing crypto
deleted by creator
They are? How?
They’re offering discounts for paying with monero
because the buyer pays transaction fees and there is no risk of chargeback so their costs are inherently lower if you pay that way?
Almost nobody else does that. They just want people to use crypto, because they’re closedness obsessed criminals.
Monero is anonymous, so it makes sense.
It’s still crypto, with all the downsides of crypto.
Oh! You mean crypto currencies, not crypto. I was confused there for a bit. :D
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
You have that backwards. Customers of a company get to decide whether or not they want to give that company their money for any reason they fucking please
I’d also argue that no one would care if this were some mid-level manager making a donation. This is the owner of a company, not “staff.”
I believe consumers have an ethical obligation to exercise their right to discontinue business with a company when its owners do something unethical.
Legally? No.
Morally? Yes. Customers give their say as to whether or not they want to give their money to some specific company every single time they engage in a business transaction. There is also nothing wrong with telling others to make the same consideration.
Morally? Yes.
How do you figure? I’d argue the opposite and state morally it’s quite litterally nobody’s business what any private person spends their money on. Especially when you’re talking about people outside the c-suite.
It’s also the only thing that is remotely managable. Otherwise, where does that crap start and end?
We are talking about some nationalist populists now (and more than “a donation”), but what about a membership of a more moderate political party? Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee’s to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
I’m allowed to do business or not do business with any company for any reason I like. Cofounder funding a political party with one of their goals being to brutalize immigrants? No thanks. Contractor wearing a company shirt was rude to me on the elevator? I’ll check the competition. Maybe I just don’t like the color of their logo?
I’m allowed to define my morals and what I would consider violating those morals would be with monetary support and no half baked slippery slope argument is going to change that.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Are you contending unless otherwise specified, people should be mandated to continue spending money with companies?
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
What exactly is the allowed reasons for doing or not doing business with people?
Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.
The co-founder publicly stated he made the donation on social media. What made him obliged to disclose this? He seems rather proud of it, in fact.
As a result, people feel they may have a moral obligation to not funnel money to him. Your stance also doesn;t really line up with your examples like
Or say your customer base for any reason is in large part Vegan, should you tell your employee’s to stop buying meat? Should they stop taking money from the non-vegan customers? How is anyone going to navigate this?
You don’t mention the specific problem you have with this, which would be mandated disclosure. By your own words, this is perfectly fine since people can chose the reasons “Anything, including having no reason at all, obviously.” to not do business with someone so I’m not sure why it’s a slippery slope to you.
No. I’m just of the opinion that I’m in no way obliged to disclose to you what I spend my money on, just because I work somewhere you spend money on.
That’s not what you said though. I don’t think anyone is arguing that employees of a company are obligated to disclose their spending habits, that would just be ludicrous. However, if that information was available or if the company itself made donations/purchases it’s perfectly reasonable as a customer to decide not to support that kind of behavior by continuing to do business with that company.
Just as one example Chick-fil-A is rather famously anti-lgbtq and regularly donates part of their profits to anti-lgbtq organizations. As a consumer it’s entirely reasonable and moral to refuse to do business with them in order to reduce the money being funnelled to morally repugnant organizations.
That’s not what you said though.
Where do you feel I’ve deviated from this point exactly?
Keep in mind that this is the question at the top of this particular thread we are responding to:
So you believe that customers of a company should have a say how the staff uses their wages?
To which loke responded, among other things:
Morally? Yes.
To which I responded what you then replied to.
I’m not quite sure where you see space for interpretation, but I feel i’ve been pretty solid with my point.
Co-founder. Very large contribution. Very unsavoury political party.
On one hand, no, they shouldn’t, on the other hand they’re free to voice their opinion and choose a different service if this is the breaking point.
Problem is, it’s hard to find a good VPN service that doesn’t fuck with alt right chuds and isn’t US based.
Try being in the southern hemisphere and trying to achieve those goals… servers are scarcer here.
Time for me to reassess ivpn, and airvpn I guess
Highly recommend everyone read the direct response this article is quoting. Direct from the other owner of the company on Hacker News. Makes the whole “scandal” seem very understandable in my opinion.
Additionally,
Not good enough. If I give them money, the fascist co-owner will use it to donate to other fascists. Either remove him from the company or lose some customers. That is their choice. There is no middle ground with fucking Nazis. It’s us or them!
I don’t think he can be removed. Mullvad is 100% owned by its two co-founders.
All I see is a bunch of both-sidesing, conflating “speech” with economic power, and making claims that clearly don’t align with their actions.
That reply just shows me that he fundamentally misunderstands the issue. By giving money to Mullvad I would directly support the pos party that this guy donates to. Do they not understand where the money in their bank account is coming from?
I read it as he implicitly does understand that and is the reason he suggests getting a refund if that is your priority. He is just urging people to see nuance that there is collateral damage for the rest of the people that make mullvad too. A loose analogy would be, I disagree with Trump and I wish my country would divest from the USA, which is all well and good, but the workers don’t have great protections and would likely be the first to hurt. Sure a majority of them voted for him I could rationalize, but that’s not the same rationalisation companies use to layoff before they actually start to hurt.
Decent people are boycotting the USA though, because that is the only chance we have to get the people of the USA to snap out of it and care enough to change their society. The same applies here, where Stromberg says it is not that big a deal, it’s just fascism.
and we appreciate y’all doing it, at least here in California.
the line for the secret delicious berries was shorter this year than usual (they are in watsonville and delicious. go get some at gizdich ranch and give Nita my love) but that’s probably because the growing season is all el nino wonky.
Sure, that’s fine, I tend to agree, I was drawing out the picture of the collateral, so it’s considered as much or as little as it is worth, but at least considered.
I would hope that the mullvad staff are completely opposed to fascism, it would be naive to believe that is true of all of them though. I have no interest in them losing their jobs (except for the fascists of course), or in the company failing. But it would be dishonest to continue supporting mullvad now, while long term not supporting companies such as unilever, monsanto, nestle, amazon etc etc. Mullvad are no doubt in a bit of a crisis right now, but I do not believe they have responded well to this… they posted on nazi twitter, but not on mastodon, or bluesky for instance. I’m currently looking into alternative vpn options, and don’t have a single one that ticks the boxes. This sucks, my government (australia) has serious overreach/privacy issues, and is very clearly in the pocket of the usa, and israel.
Many options, so much dodgy. https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships
In the last couple of months I just bought 12 months through a voucher that is no more so doubt I’d get a refund, so I’ve got some time to decide. I swear everything I look into deep enough has something going wrong with it, but I guess all we can do it take the battles we can handle.
I added 4 months about a week ago, applied for a refund today, and it was approved today. I believe the only chance we have of mullvad removing the ahole is a mass of refunds, customers need to show they care. My timing was of course very lucky in this respect.
My first vpn provider was called vpnarea, had them for a few years, and ended up paying for a 2, or 3 year discounted block, before they vanished and took my money with them.
I appreciate that mullvad doesn’t do any of that ‘60% off’ bs, and I can/could just pay for 3 months, or 5 months, or whatever
it’s a trash industry, decent resources are very difficult to find, everyone is recommending nord etc with affiliate links, heaps of vpn company sites lack pertinent details, have servers in countries they shouldn’t, or don’t have servers where they should, are owned, or based in dodgy countries etc etc. Many of them appear to suck for linux completely, or unless you are using vanilla ubuntu, or fedora etc
somewhat handy(ish) https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships
less handy, but still https://www.vpnlocations.info/
Sounds reasonable for me to cancel Mullvad and tell everyone else to cancel. I don’t care if that piece of shit white supremacist Nazi did it as a personal choice or as part of the company. He is my enemy, I am at war with him and I will not do anything to support him. Hopefully enough people stand up so they put him out on his ass and he loses everything which is less than Nazi’s deserve.
Understandable how?
Understandable in that there’s no way a company or employer can tell you how to spend your money. That there’s 2 owners with divided beliefs who are working for a similar cause. They are indeed private individuals using their individually earned money for private purposes.
If, let’s say, Mullvad as a company was donating to this political party, that would be alarming and worth freaking out about, but it’s one guy, basically donating with his funds he makes from his job. In a corporate environment there are many different people with different beliefs, of different economic statuses. Somebody might be donating thousands to one candidate, another donating hundreds to another.
Just because the co-owner of a company you like supports somebody you don’t like, doesn’t mean you should jump ship. Who knows if everybody else in the company is donating to other political causes?
Also i want to point out that understanding doesn’t equal support. it’s closer to validation, like, you can think what they’re saying makes sense but disagree with it.
If I had any doubts about leaving, the apathy shown in your screenshots from the co-founder has removed them
Private wealth is a mistake
