cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8915892

(original article in Swedish that reported this)

Posting this because I hadn’t heard about it before and I’m probably not the only Mullvad user here, so might as well.

I’m not Swedish, but going off NATOpedia, it seems like the party is basically reinventing fascism from first principles:

The party claims to stand for a “class-conscious populism” which according to party leader Markus Allard takes inspiration from marxist ideology and unites the “productive” classes of society against the “Transferiat”, with the “Transferiat” being a term coined by Allard to describe the classes of society that lives off transfers that are a net negative for society such as those who, despite having an ability to work, live off social welfare benefits, as well as those who work “made-up services”[…]

The party differs from modern day left-wing parties by seeing the working class as co-dependent with people working in enterprise and business and instead sees the classes that “live off transfers”, as specified, as a large economic net-negative and an obstacle for a functional society.

visible-disgust Their ideology is nonsense fake-marxist revisionism to redirect anger at capitalism and turn it against immigrants and people who need social welfare (though they do back some generally left oriented social policies, their main thing appears to be racism)

Even if you’re comfortable with funding this, it still begs the question of just how trustworthy Mullvad actually is.

I guess this still beats any of the dozens of Israeli VPNs that definitely spy on you, but it’s not great emilie-shrug

  • This isn’t good. It’s also not entirely correct. Mullvad isn’t financing this party directly. One of the owners took his money he made from the company and donated it to the loonies. He could’ve bought crypto with it, spent it in blow maybe, but he didn’t. “Mullvad is financing this party” is not correct. “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern. So is their tepid response to the story breaking. I would still advise caution, hammer them with public outrage pressure on the socials, and hope they get rid of the loonie party donor before you bankrupt an otherwise serviceable VPN provider. If that guy is still there in a couple of months, by all means leave.

    There is no shortage of c@<%s in the tech sector.

    • Signtist ( Signtist@bookwyr.me ) 
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      I mean, it doesn’t really matter who actively takes the stance or not. The only question that matters is where the money you spend ends up, and whether you want it to end up there. If you don’t want your money to end up in the hands of a far right party, you probably don’t want to pay the company that pays the guy who pays a far right party.

      Mullvad may say it doesn’t support his views, but the main form of support is financial backing, and his own company is obviously going to pay him, so it does support him, regardless of whether or not it wants to take that stance. If you give the company money, then you’re supporting it, allowing it to support him, regardless of whether or not you want to.

      It’s like Harry Potter; even if no corporate announcement is ever going to be made to agree with JK Rowling’s anti-trans beliefs, your money spent on merchandise for the franchise still ends up in her hands, and is subsequently moved into the hands of the anti-trans organizations she supports.

      • You may be as outraged as you want. I just pointed out that Mullvad didn’t do anything (to their detriment, at this point) like the title of the post suggested. That’s misrepresenting the facts. If you feel like that distinction (a company endorsement vs. a private donation) doesn’t make a difference, that’s fine. I get that. I left Proton when their CEO was praising the regime of 47 for tech regulation. I just believe we should be mad for the right reasons. Facts are good.

        It’s been pointed out here in the thread that the majority of the donation to the horseshoe loonie party may in fact have come from other income streams, as Mullvad doesn’t pay an awful lot. I don’t know if that’s true but that would put another spin on the story as well.

        There is no shortage of c@>=s in the author community either. Let’s not mention her name again. She’s probably a lot richer and therefore a lot more impactful with her magic money than this mad meatball. In my estimation, a dollar spent in the famous magician universe will have a lot more negative impact on the trans community than a comparable amount of kronor at Mullvad for immigrants to Sweden. The bigger threat there are probably the Sweden Democrats and they’re already in parliament as the second largest fraction.

      • psycotica0 ( psycotica0@lemmy.ca ) 
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        I don’t care about Mullvad, but this is an interesting philosophical question. How far does that chain of money carry responsibility? Like, what if you donate to a hospital, and a nurse at the hospital uses their wages to buy bread, and the owner of the bread factory is problematic?

        Definitely some fraction of my donation went to the bread factory owner’s politics, but is it my responsibility? Should I withhold donations to the hospital until they’ve pressured the nurse to buy a different brand of bread, or let them go?

        Definitely the bread factory owner has a bunch of money, and money is power, and that money was given by customers in exchange for bread, so at some point if we want their power to diminish steps must be taken. But is the hospital donor’s money the right lever for that? Does it outweigh the benefits?

        What if the bread factory’s owner is fine, but has a worker who spends their money on a problematic cause. Is it still the hospital donor’s responsibility?

        • That’s kinda similar question I had while learning about veganism. It’s not possible in absolute sense to get rid of animal cruelty, there’s always going to have some indirect connection cause the way we have designed our system. So the general answer for me is; as practicable as possible and not letting perfect be the archenemy of good

        • 4grams ( 4grams@awful.systems ) 
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          I don’t think it’s as hard to draw a line as you are portraying it. The hypothetical nurse and bread factory is a non-issue, we’re talking fractions of the bottom line of any of the involved parties. This mulvad thing is the majority of the financial backing of a party by one high level person, who’s made his money from this organization.

          I’m quite comfortable putting them under the same umbrella, and quite comfortable ignoring the hypothetical.

          But think there might be a philosophical question here, but I kinda think this is begging for one a bit.

        • Signtist ( Signtist@bookwyr.me ) 
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          I believe responsibility is a personal choice. How much something matters depends on how much it matters to you. The more important thing is that you ask the relevant questions to actually assess what matters and how you address issues that arise between what you’re doing and how that affects the world around you.

          Do you consider the fraction of your hospital donation that goes to the nurse to be significant enough to change how you donate? And do you consider the nurse’s bread purchases to be a significant enough portion of the bread factory’s profits? And do you consider the significance of that to outweigh the significance of the nurse having enough to eat? And if something about this does reach that level of significance to you, is changing your donation to the hospital the method by which you want to address the issues with the bread factory owner, or is there another action that might be more effective?

          It’s difficult to address these issues in daily life due to their emergent complexity, but the more we can do to be ethical, the more of a positive impact we can have on the world around us.

      • ramble81 ( ramble81@lemmy.zip ) 
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        The only question that matters is where the money you spend ends up, and whether you want it to end up there

        Serious question to that. How many degrees of separation does that account for? If I spent money at a random company, that does not endorse a far right candidate, but then it pays an employee and that employee then turns around and supports a far right candidate, is it still “my money”?

        Does it matter if they’re a front line worker or if they’re a manager or a C-level if it’s not done by the company directly? Do you have to vet out the buying habits of every employee at every company you spend money on?

        I think of Chic-Fil-A, which is different because money from sales goes straight to the foundation, which is used against LGBTQ+ people, but if someone were to be paid via paycheck and then spent it at Chic-Fil-A, is it my money anymore?

        • Signtist ( Signtist@bookwyr.me ) 
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          The amount of degrees of separation is going to have different weights for different people. My point is more concerning the knowledge of the situation, and how that might impact decision making moving forward. This guy spent the money he got from us on the far-right party, which means we helped fund it, but we didn’t know at the time that our money would be used in that way, so we can’t say we were responsible for that support. Now we are aware of that pipeline, and so we can no longer claim separation from it moving forward. There’s still a debate to be had about whether it matters enough for us to avoid putting more money into it, and that cutoff is going to be different from person to person, but the pipeline itself is there and must be factored into our decision making moving forward regardless.

        • But that’s even less reason to give them money, if he is a co-owner part of the profit directly funds fascism. It’s not just about funding the parties, but having mullvad as the defacto gold standard, continuing to do business with them gives fascists co-ownership over parts of privacy-critical infrastructure. It’s not a serviceable VPN provider if it’s co-owned by fascists??

    • prole ( prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) Banned from community
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      “Your Mullvad fees may have ended up indirectly financing this party” is correct and an ongoing concern.

      Is it really “may have”? Seems pretty clear that they have.

    • Berntsson apparently gets most of his income from other companies that he owns (in investments), with Mullvad not being run primarily as a dividend source, so Mullvad’s contribution to the money he donated to the Nazis was probably small. Still, a small amount of shit in the punchbowl is still faecal contamination, though it may be good to keep the facts in mind if weighing up Mullvad vs. Proton vs. Kape and evaluating acceptable compromises (ethical consumption under capitalism and all that).

      • pmk ( pmk@piefed.ca ) 
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        I don’t know how much you know about Örebropartiet, but they’ve been described as both left and right populist with nationalist and marxist ideas. A study made at Lunds University describe them as “authoritarian left-populism”. What they have in common with the actual Nazis is that they want less immigration. We could decide that anyone who wants less immigration is a nazi, sure, but that’s a bit dishonest. The founder of Örebropartiet has his background in the Swedish Left party, where he was controversial in part because he defended leftist violent activism.

          • pmk ( pmk@piefed.ca ) 
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            We don’t have duopolies in Sweden, we have lots of parties and shifting constellations of parties pre and post elections, especially on a local municipality level.

            Their key issues are strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care.

            Would you say these are typical left or right stances? Their leader say: neither.

        • Melusine ( Melusine@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ) 
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          Honestly, trying to descend from Marx and wanting to deport migrants is a sign of poor intelligence. At some point, the German, during WW2 also had some social benefits, and still, nobody with a working brain considers that thc nazis where somehow leftists. I’d even say it makes Örebropartiet closer to Nazis than let’s say the RN in France.

            • Huh? That’s an extremely odd comparison. Citizens of a country are not inherently fascist just because their leader is, but if they hold the same ideology they can go fuck themselves.

              I didn’t say anything about the other co founder, but let me put it this way… The company is owned by both of them. One of them made a half million donation. By proxy it makes the other person look bad. Its as they say, bad for business. My overall point is that I would not trust my privacy with this company as one half of the owners have access to the prod environment, your logs and clearly wants to harm others based on his political views.

              I’m really not sure what you’re playing devils advocate for. Are you worried that people will assume you hold those views? Do you own stock in the company? Are you worried about restriction of speech? Genuinely I’d like to know.

            • kossa ( kossa@feddit.org ) 
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              being a nazi doesn’t automatically mean that the country you live in is a nazi country

              True

              or that the company you co-founded is a nazi company.

              False

              Maybe not if you have a hundred co-founders…but if you have one co-founder…you probably just founded a nazi company ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) 
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      No, the Mullvad company isn’t sponsoring a nazi party, but the company is owned by 50% of the one who did it, $500k, money gained with this company. This rest for me also at least 50% of trust in this company. Its not the same, if a company with 100 employees has an employee nazi, as when the owner is one. Because this mean, every money which pay the user for an service, 50% serve to support a nazi party. Stop fooling around with “he used his private money”, it’s money he earned with this company, by donations, VPN and services, paid by the users. Brendan Eich was fired by Mozilla for less.

      • Stop fooling around with “he used his private money”, it’s money he earned with this company, by donations, VPN and services, paid by the users.

        What you call fooling around I call a factual distinction. It’s also been pointed out that Mullvad money wasn’t possibly a big bulk of the donation. Because they’re not raking in the dough.

        I’m not telling you not to be outraged. If I were a customer of theirs I’d be mad too. You draw your own line and that’s just fine with me. Let me draw mine.

        I believe facts matter. Facts like Mullvad didn’t directly fund a Nazi party, but one of their owners did. And it wasn’t per se a Nazi party becausre they are more of the horseshoe persuasion where they try to marry ideas from the extreme right with those from the extreme left, which is an unfortunate trend in European politics right now. And I’ve pointed this out before: the real threat is already in the Swedish parliament as the 2nd largest fraction. They are the Sweden Democrats and they are probably more deserving of the Nazi label.

        • Zerush ( Zerush@lemmy.ml ) 
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          I understand your point of view, but I can only speak mine. The advance of the far right in Europe and the rest of the world is more than worrying and must be fought, not facilitated. A company must also look at its image in the eyes of the public and show ethics and respect for the customer and user.

          Mullvad is undoubtedly a technically good browser with excellent privacy-protecting features, but precisely for this reason it cannot be tolerated that its CEO supports a political party that promotes the exact opposite of what Mullvad claims to defend, because this takes away confidence in the future developments of this browser and what path it will take. The influence of someone who owns 50% of the company is surely not small and the influence and political orientation he has matters, even if it seems a good product.

          Eg. Starlink, for sure very usefull to permit the connection in a lot of countries without infrastructure, in catastrophes, in trains, flights, etc. but I see also a worldwide network controlled by one person, Musk. Right populism always use the Honeypot methode for it’s advance.

      • Their statement reads

        It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.

        They’re pretty clearly saying that they as a company have no part in this political support.

        • vas ( vas@lemmy.ml ) 
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          True. But they did not say that they are _against_ the donation.

          The original comment should simply be reworded to “and Mullvad says it has nothing to do with the donation and wasn’t aware of it” or something like that. Remove “claim to be against”.

            • vas ( vas@lemmy.ml ) 
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              Absolutely. IDK why me or you are getting downvotes tho. Did they claim to be agai st as the original commenter said? No. Did they distance themselves and clearly separate themselves? Yes.

            • JillyB ( JillyB@beehaw.org ) 
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              If they wanted you to think his actions were against their values, they would have said “against”. The fact that it’s a company owner and CEO, means that the company values and the owner’s values are the same, whether they publicly state it or not. That’s why they’ve made such a fence-sitting PR statement. Even when they’re trying to downplay the link between the company values and the owner’s values, they don’t commit because the owner’s values are the company’s values.

        • sudoer777 ( sudoer777@lemmy.ml ) 
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          It isn’t obvious though because it’s the fucking cofounder that’s doing it and they keep misrepresenting it as a speech issue. It isn’t some random employee, it’s the people who invented and make the decisions for the service, and it’s a massive amount of money as well

    • M137 ( M137@lemmy.today ) 
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      It has been here on Lemmy too, several threads on the front page without the misleading title. OP either did that on purpose (them not replying here at all gives that more weight IMO) or they didn’t even try to see if it had been posted and didn’t read anything in the article and posted without caring if the title is ture or not. The post should be removed.

  • Kaul ( TheKaul@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    Clickbait title. It’s one of the coowners who has donated his personal funds to this party. The other owner and other members of the company disapprove of the decision.

    • As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privilege, then they are ‘liberal’. But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

      Assata Shakur

  • Although this was a private donation and not Mullvad as a company, it’s still bad. I’ve been a Mullvad user for a few years now and I dislike the idea that some of the money I’ve paid to them, no matter how little overall, might have been used to support a political party that pushes for “remigration”.

    I may have very indirectly helped finance a fascist party, and I’m not okay with that. I’d like Mullvad to take steps to ensure that this can’t happen again. Until then, I can’t be sure where my money will end up.

  • Mullvad issued a response. Which IMO is shitty.

    Source

    Statement from Mullvad

    Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.

    Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don’t agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don’t agree with.

    We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.

    This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.

    The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.

    It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.

    That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it’s important to honor that, and will gladly refund you.

  • blueworld ( blueworld@piefed.world ) 
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    3 months ago

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696800

    Hi,

    Mullvad has two owners, founders, and CEOs - Daniel Berntsson, and me, Fredrik Strömberg. All posts I’ve seen yesterday and today, including the newspaper articles, talk about Mullvad as if Daniel is the single owner, founder and CEO. It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.

    If you have any questions, comments or concerns you’re welcome to comment on this thread, or email our customer support.

    See below for the response you’ll get from support:


    Mullvad is a political company. We fight for freedom of speech, freedom of information and the right to privacy. These are firmly held values of the founders of Mullvad.

    Mullvad protects the right for people to express things we don’t agree with. We protect the right of everyone to access views we don’t agree with.

    We also live these values by being tolerant in our daily work. Everyone is welcome to collaborate with Mullvad if they share these narrow core values. As employees, contractors, customers, suppliers, lobbyists, campaign partners or whatever it might be. No matter what their other opinions are and no matter whether the founders or anyone else in Mullvad dislike them. The founders themselves fundamentally disagree on several important issues.

    This is what allows us to advance our common causes. Being in a tolerant and intellectually open environment is also liberating and promotes truth seeking.

    The more people do this, the better a place the world will be.

    It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.

    That said, if you no longer want to be a Mullvad customer for philosophical reasons, we think it’s important to honor that. In that case, reach out to support.

  • Mikina ( Mikina@programming.dev ) 
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    That is a really difficult situation to be in, and I don’t envy them. I’m struggling with coming up with a solution to this, when one of your co-founders, that you basically can’t force out if I understand it correctly, is using his own money, he made from the company, but it’s still his own, to go against your mission.

    If they can’t convince him to not do that, there’s not much they can do.

    I really like Mullvad, it’s the only VPN that I feel kind of safe abiut and trust them, but if a part of my money goes directly to fund extremistic parties, then I simply won’t do that and will be asking for a refund. I really hope they figure something out.

    But Mullvad could also react a little better, by emphasizing that they would remove him if they could, and that they are working on a solution. Because it kind of isn’t their fault, and it sucks to be in a position like this. Currently it’s like Tesla or SpaceX saying that they don’t agree with Musk’s values, and that he’s spending his own money they have no control over, as if that was an argument why it’s fiine to buy Tesla or invest into SpaceX.

    But unsubscribing from Mullvad is the best thing we can do now, hopefully the co-founder loosing his income will make him reconsider the PR of his personal spendings, and the dropping number will force him to reconsider.

    • He owns 50% of the company. He would be legally within his rights to sack anyone moving against him. Short of him being visited by three ghosts and persuaded to change his ways/sell his share to someone more sympathetic to the company’s stated values/convert it to an employee-owned cooperative, there’s not much that can be done.

      • Mikina ( Mikina@programming.dev ) 
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        There’s still the second owner who can maybe convince him, or strike a deal.

        A lot of people boycoting Mullvad over it might be the motivation he needs, but it’s not an easy position to be in, and I’m not getting my hopes up.

        He can also maybe just take/sell his half and fork out? But even to me, who knows nothing about running this scale of business, that sounds like something unreasonable.

    • irate944 ( irate944@piefed.social ) 
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      But Mullvad could also react a little better, by emphasizing that they would remove him if they could, and that they are working on a solution.

      Don’t anthropomorphize companies mate. That’s not how it works.

      Think about it, from inside the company point of view: who, exactly, would write and post something like that?

      Mullvad isn’t a company with a board that can vote out a shareholder. Berntsson and Stromberg are the sole shareholders and co-CEOs, 50/50. There’s no mechanism to “remove” a co-owner short of him voluntarily selling his stake or a negotiated buyout, and neither will happen because of some angry posts on the internet.

      Mullvad isn’t a separate entity with its own thoughts and ideologies. It’s two guys who hire people to offer a service

      • Mikina ( Mikina@programming.dev ) 
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        You are right, that’s what I was trying to say that there’s not much they can do about it. I haven’t mentioned it directly, but by “Mullvad”, I mostly meant the second owner. It’s now mostly up to him to either somehow deal with his co-owner, or just loose hopefully a lot of customers.

        Lot of people boycotting Mullvad because of this is the only thing that may help in this regard, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

    • If it actually matters that you have privacy and anonymity it’s probably best to not switch.

      You know what’s best for you, but the guilt of knowing one drop of your money goes to someone whom you find repugnant is preferable to losing life or safety.

      • Mikina ( Mikina@programming.dev ) 
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        I was judt thinking about this, especially considering that it’s very probable that most of the money I spend are eventually financing lobyiing and who-knows what else, if you were to track them down simillarly.

        But, if it’s true that 75% of the donations the party has received is from the Mullvad co-owner, there is a chance that it would allow them to keep on surviving even when they shouldn’t, and if they manage to get elected (which unfortunately seems to be more and more of a trend), it can cause a lot more harm than a little bit of lost privacy.

        I don’t know. I don’t want to stop supporting Mullvad, but if that means also giving a far right party a better chance at surviving, then it sucks.

  • sp3ctre ( sp3ctre@feddit.org ) 
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    It’s pretty easy in my opinion. We see, that right wing shit spreads around the world.

    My consequences will be: Any company supporting this shit (even indirectly) will not be paid with my money in the future.

    Too bad my subscription for a year has been paid a few weeks ago…

  • Nobody using Mullvad is going to have their credit card tied directly to it. Much less are they going to start calling financial institutions and government agencies and tell them they’re a Mullvad user.

    You need to get way more subtle with your propaganda, corpos.