Proton is funding the French far right on YouTube

Posted by partsch 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by eightysixfour 1 day ago

Response from Proton

> You're right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.

> Vincent Lapierre's channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.

> Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn't have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that's on us.

> We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn't. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator's views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.

> But that distinction doesn't excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn't meet it this time. We're now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn't happen again.

> If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment...

Comment by chomp 1 day ago

> You're right to raise this

Is this LLM generated?

Comment by smithoc 1 day ago

Does it matter if it was?

It's 2026. LLMs are integrated into text editors the same way as spell checkers and grammar checkers. Even if people write things themselves, they likely are using LLMs to review and edit.

This isn't a bot pretending to be a human, this is an official announcement from a company. It's going to be written by a committee and edited by legal and PR and marketing anyway. Who cares if one (or several) of those steps used an LLM.

Comment by chomp 1 day ago

Yes? Can’t take 10 minutes to speak (or at least redraft) with your own voice?

I’ve written PR copy solo, and in committee. It’s not rocket surgery. It’s a group of people standing around with a thesaurus. But if you leave AI-isms in, just feels like you whipped it out while coffee was brewing.

Comment by eightysixfour 1 day ago

I'm still deciding how I feel about LLM generated text in situations like this. My struggle is that the content is what matters and complaining about use of an LLM is like complaining that someone didn't work hard enough. I'm not sure I value how hard they worked to craft it or the exact words, I value the content itself.

This isn't true in something like fictional content, but...

Comment by O1111OOO 23 hours ago

>> You're right to raise this

> Is this LLM generated?

Thank you for noticing this and pointing it out. I don't use LLM often and would have missed it. How many hours a day do you spend actively using AI?

Comment by blitzar 1 day ago

You're right to raise this

Comment by addandsubtract 1 day ago

Lazy enough to draft their response with LLMs, but not diligent enough to vett their sponsors with LLMs.

Comment by Fire-Dragon-DoL 1 day ago

Possibly reworded by llm. It would make sense for sensitive communication

Comment by surgical_fire 1 day ago

This is valid construct in languages, and a very legitimate use of this construct in the context.

If this was AI generated (which I am not convinced of given the full text), it escapes my alarm bells.

Comment by Yizahi 1 day ago

What a load of damage control. Partnerships are not something dumb algorithm can pick up like in some AdSense campaign. This was deliberately done by a human after a series of negotiations between parties in writing. You (Proton) were absolutely not intentionally avoiding it, but you were intentionally seeking it and finalized the contract yourself.

Comment by bulbar 15 hours ago

Mistakes happen. It's not like they contracted with a bunch of such channels, just a singular one.

Comment by surgical_fire 1 day ago

Honestly, I think this is a good response.

Does not dodge responsibility, offers a good explanation, agrees that current vetting process is imperfect.

Comment by slater 1 day ago

> We rely on your [..] vigilance

A crazy idea, but: Why not be vigilant, yourselves?

Comment by zatertip 1 day ago

They responded around 3 hours ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/can_som...

Comment by stgo 1 day ago

After the 404 piece on them (https://404media.co/proton-mail-helped-fbi-unmask-anonymous-...), this is the second stab at the good opinion I had about them :/

Not saying there's a pattern behind those two informations but I'll definitely be watching more closely their news.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

i can totally understand this piece of news being a "stab".

but, i dont understand the 404 piece. they are a lawfully operating company, they will answer lawful requests. the same will be true of any and all companies you choose to use for your mail.

in this case, only payment data was handed over. if your payment history is of concern, proton accepts cash and bitcoin

(if anything, this should be a point in favor of proton, seeing as how the only data they were able to hand over was payment data, and not email contents)

Comment by stgo 19 hours ago

It's possible that the 404 stab might be a personal one and comes from too high expectations from me and/or misunderstanding about how private our data was with them.

The privacy tech was part of their marketing, I'm quite sure about that. But the fact that they're swiss might also have helped to believe that privacy wouldn't be bargained (vs/ american companies) => I honestly don't remember if it was a claim they had.

Comment by 13 hours ago

Comment by kittikitti 1 day ago

I'm very sorry to hear about this news. I've read through the responses from Proton and don't find it sufficient. I'm now seeking an alternative even though one of my current emails are provided through Proton Mail.

Comment by john_strinlai 1 day ago

>I've read through the responses from Proton and don't find it sufficient.

i thought their response was pretty reasonable.

what would a sufficient response for you look like?

Comment by samrus 1 day ago

Seemed sufficient to me. They said it was a mistake and they'll be more careful not to sponsor nazis in the future

Comment by jasonlotito 1 day ago

> I've read through the responses from Proton and don't find it sufficient.

Genuinely curious: What do you find insufficient specifically?

Comment by partsch 1 day ago

Deleting posts about this topic from /r/proton (which is moderated by proton)!?

Comment by ThrowawayTestr 1 day ago

So they sponsored one YouTuber. What's the problem exactly?

Comment by bradley13 1 day ago

[flagged]

Comment by orwin 1 day ago

Basically, yes. If you support inequality in front of the law (basically that laws should apply differently depending on your skin n colour or your religion), you are far right. Shouldn't be that hard to understand. In general, most reactionary politics are far-right, although you're right that being reactionnary isn't enough to be categorised as such. But any reactionnary policy that create more hierarchical levels is definitely in that category.

Comment by bradley13 19 hours ago

The problem with immigrants in Europe from Africa and the Middle East isn't their skin color, it's their religion, which is inseparable from their culture. Immigrants from these countries commit literally an order of magnitude (10x) more serious crimes, from assault to rape. They do not respect Western culture or law: many have explicitly stated that they want Sharia, and in many cases they have established a parallel system of Sharia courts.

Claiming people objecting to this are "racist" is completely missing the point. It's not "far right" to want to protect your society from a literal invasion of incompatible people.