646
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
646 points (91.4% liked)
Privacy
32796 readers
1672 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, to get this straight, for you it's impossible to recognize that a pick for a position is a good pick in the Trump government, by definition, without consideration of the actual pick?
To me this is religion, not politics or ideology (which I both consider very good things). To be even more clear, I consider Andy's position completely rational and legitimate in this case. I believe it's absolutely legitimate to be happy Trump picked someone good for a position and at the same time not support the rest 98%. At most, the interesting debate is why that pick is not good, which is 100% opinable and worthy of a discussion.
But saying that any statement, in any context, whatever narrow and specific equal full support is completely insane to me.
Context matters. Why did you ignore it? We see so many CEOs kissing Trump's feet these days. Here Andy is, doing the same... Of course I don't know what's in Andy's head, but Trump loves groveling, and clearly Andy is riding that bandwagon on purpose.
That's not context, that's a superficial observation. Zuck kissed the ring by changing Facebook policy to align with trump/musk posture on "free speech", Andy said he likes the antitrust pick. They are completely different things.
Right, Andy's action was bad but not as bad. We agree. It's not identical.
And when given the chance to explain how he felt about this situation, on how the bad timing is ... purely accidental or something ... he did a bad job of it. Which suggests our original conclusions were in fact correct.
Also, if you think observations about time, place, and manner are superfluous, that's a peculiar thought. Maybe we disagree. Maybe I think basic elements of societal interaction and communication are important and informative.
This tweet happened right after trump picked for the antitrust position. The "time" is completely logical, the "place" is a tweet and the manner is a short statement supporting that pick. Also proton is a US company, so it doesn't have the same reason to "bend the knee" as other US big tech are doing.
So it's not that I am ignoring context, I genuinely don't see relation. He praised something that he pushes for years, he did not suddenly switch to "free speech" like Zuck.
If all he said was literally "i approve of this pick for this position" you'd be correct.
What actually happened was he approved of the pick and also claimed the republicans are now actually the party that stands for the "little guy".
Then followed up with a non apology that claimed what he said was not intended to be a "political statement".
by all means, argue that you think there's a fuss over nothing, but if you leave important context out seemingly because it doesn't suit your narrative it weakens your argument substantially.
I know what happened, I followed quite thoroughly.
He thinks that republicans are now the ones with a higher chance to push antitrust cases against big tech (I.e., work for the little guy - EDIT: source). He thinks this based on the last few years and a few things that happened. He likes the nomination from Trump. How is this a full support to Trump? How believing that republicans will do better - in this area - equals being a Nazi?
Of course I believe that there is a fuss over nothing. The above statement has been inflated and I have already read "he applauded to Trump antitrans policies", " posted Nazi symbols" and other complete fantasies.
Many people, who are on the internet on a perpetual witch hunt decided to interpret a clearly specific tweet (about antitrust and big tech) as a global political statement, and read that "little guy" as "common man" or - I have read it here on Lemmy - "working class". Basically everyone tried to propose ideas about why that post was so awful, rather than first trying to understand what the hell he meant. I will agree the first tweet is ambiguous, but that's because it's a 200 characters tweet, he then explained his position quite clearly, and the summary above is what he actually meant.
This "context" added doesn't move my post a centimeter IMO.
While it's certainly true that some of the people who are angry at him for that tweet are saying things in their anger that are overboard, I think only pointing out the most ridiculous things that people who disagree with you have ever said in their anger is a really terrible way of engaging honestly on the subject.
It's important to remember that an authoritarian that always figured out what the right thing to do was and did the opposite of that would be a really bad authoritarian. Republicans at the state level have been increasing state surveillance to hunt down and punish people for choices they make with their own bodies. For a lot of people in America, Trump is the head of the organization that they want privacy to protect themselves from, and the current largest threat to privacy in America.
For the CEO of a company that is supposedly about protecting our privacy to completely unprompted start publicly praising decisions made by the very threat we're supposed to trust them to protect us from, and then to double down on their praise when called out, is deeply concerning.
Yes. It's true that not every single thing Trump does will be the worst possible thing, but his goals are fundamentally opposed to ours. When I say I want big tech to be broken up it's because I want their to be less concentration of power. When Trump wants to break up big tech it's because he wants to eliminate the competition to his concentration of power. That is not worthy of my praise, even if in any one particular instance the thing he is doing is similar to what I would do, and the fact that the CEO of Proton either doesn't understand this or doesn't care is deeply concerning. I do not trust them after this, and I doubt they can ever get that trust back.
He praised one thing, and motivated that praise. It's 100% possible to disagree, but I don't find it concerning at all. I find it reasonable, because proton can better protect the privacy of users if more people can choose freely privacy oriented tools (like proton). Hence, if Trump does or says something that can help moving in that direction, it can be labeled as a good thing. Not every sentence is a collective or global assessment of all things considered.
So I am good with him doing the right thing for the wrong reason, and I wish him a swift failure afterwards.
Have you considered that he might not agree with what is just your opinion? Obviously you are free to draw any conclusion you want and not use them.
See, now that's a more thorough explanation of your position.
I disagree with pretty much all of your assertions (though the witch hunt stuff can be true sometimes) , but at least i know I'm disagreeing with an opinion formed using the whole of the information provided.
It shows you read the initial information in it's entirety and still came to the conclusion you did.
That removes the possibility of responses such as "Did you even read the initial tweet?".
Well... it should remove that possibility, in practice it just means you can safely ignore those responses because clearly the people making those responses haven't read your response in it's entirety.