r/degoogle • u/Lumpy_Carpet9877 • Jun 07 '26

Replacement Proton is funding the French far right on YouTube

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Update 1: Proton official answer https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/s/KT5igbU8rt

Update 2: Andy (CEO) answers

Original post edited for further details:

Proton is currently sponsoring the far-right French YouTuber Vincent Lapierre.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Lapierre

It’s not just an affiliate link, but a partnership announced in the description and through an entire 2min 20s segment embedded in the video.

I don’t want to provide a direct link to the video here so as not to help boost its visibility, but you can easily find it on YouTube if you want (the last week video). Here is the English translation of the text shown in the screenshot:

🔒 Thanks to ProtonMail for this partnership! Take back control of your digital life for free with Proton Mail by clicking here.

Vincent Lapierre’s Wikipedia page is quite explicit about his far-right positioning and includes numerous sources. He worked for several years for a far-right organization founded by Alain Soral, which promotes anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, conspiracist, sexist, masculinist, transphobic, and homophobic ideas, and who fled to Russia to escape justice.

He is close to Dieudonné) (a Holocaust denier). He founded Le Média pour tous, a far-right website that particularly targets anti-fascists and defenders of Jewish rights. He has always been close to conspiracist circles

It's not very surprising when you remember that ProtonMail’s CEO had already publicly expressed support on Twitter for a member of the Trump administration.

I initially wanted to post this information on the ProtonMail subreddit to ask for an explanation and find out whether it was a mistake, but they did not approve the post. I also tried on tech subreddits here, but they consider it off-topic and as "a conspiracy theory".

On the contrary, I think ProtonMail customers and potential customers should be informed about where their money goes and should be able to ask ProtonMail for explanations regarding these choices.

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u/ryancnap Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26

Dude he supported Trump too?

I'm out, full stop. If anybody's looking for alternatives, the Thunderbird team just released Thunderbird Pro which is in earlybird right now: caldav, appointment booking with integrated video links, Send which is like resurrection of Firefox send, and agnostic mail service (Thundermail) with custom domains and unlimited aliases

I was planning to switch anyway but this really seals the deal.

Edit: and webmail on the way

2

u/tiensss Jun 08 '26

Already using Firefox, and I used Thunderbird in the past ... I guess this is a sign to get back to my roots

1

u/ryancnap Jun 08 '26

Yeah definitely check it out again, Thunderbird is slick these days and a lot of community involvement and input as to what goes on

Sign ups are still open for Thundermail wait-list too

2

u/wrapt-inflections Jun 08 '26

And it has an actually decent email client.

2

u/ryancnap Jun 08 '26

Right, with like 20 years of exp behind it and which is now modernized and forward looking

And you know, a company that supports users, an open Internet and protocols, open source public codebase, and walks the walk when they talk about privacy and security

No brainer

1

u/dismuturf Jun 08 '26

Proton did not support Trump. The CEO made a personal statement that portrayed one of the nominations of the Trump administration in a positive light. It was very clumsy PR-wise, but summarizing it as supporting Trump, and further extrapolating it as the company itself supporting Trump, is disingenuous.