Personally, I'd rather not have a company I work for police my social media and political activities just so that they fit with what the company desires. That would make me quit as I value a separation between my personal and work activities.
That said, the fact that the person involved is the founder of this company (not a regular employee) does change things though. I don't know anything about the politics involved, but (with the exception of recent American executives) I would imagine you would want the people who run your company to be more neutral as to prevent controversy (or at least do so quietly).
panarky 2 hours ago [-]
I don't want the founders and operators of my free-expression tool to be neutral.
I want them to be strongly biased in favor of free expression.
But they take my money and use it restrict how people dress, how they pray, what customs they are allowed to follow, what they teach their kids.
The agenda they support is anti-free-expression, and that's worse than neutral.
teravor 2 hours ago [-]
it was a mistake to respond, over 90% of the controversy is performative as it nearly always is. the ideologues will posture and claim that they are dropping mullvad while being unlikely to follow through.
most people wouldn't even know the controversy happened nor care. with the response, you now trigger various human instincts that draw attention, promote further gossiping and wondering where the fire is with all the smoke.
letmevoteplease 56 minutes ago [-]
A mistake from a public relations perspective, but I think taking an explicit stance against deplatforming and self-censorship is consistent with Mullvad's stated mission.
calldacopsidgaf 2 hours ago [-]
"Mullvad will continue to keep its values and mission separate from the broader views of its founders." - the sentence immediately following a link to Daniel's soapbox blog post
> We want to liken Mullvad to a force of nature. Or to cryptography. It just mechanically does its thing with no human arbiters.
I can't even find the right words to describe how wrong this sounds to me
viccis 1 hours ago [-]
I don't see how that particular political expression is a risk to their VPN's stance. This is a lot of nothing; would have been better to ignore the screeching from Bluesky.
t-van 2 hours ago [-]
Who is the most trusted VPN provider now?
Cider9986 2 hours ago [-]
Mullvad, IVPN and Proton VPN are all trusted so choosing depends on your priorities with the small differences between them.
Obscura by definition is the same or better than Mullvad because of the multi-party relay. Similar with iCloud Private Relay but that's only for Safari which is inadequate.
Nym looks promising but mixnets haven't been tested as much as the Tor network.
kivle 1 hours ago [-]
Proton VPN had their own controversial episode earlier this summer:
The party has been variously characterised as left-wing and right-wing, as well as populist, nationalist and conservative.
Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include 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,[3] ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care.[4][5] 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.
It sounds like the usual far right bottom line dressed up with a bunch of “Free Pizza” promises to cover it with a veneer.
Personally I wish people like his had the balls to stop hiding behind that kind of thing, we all know what someone is about when “immigration is the main problem” in their viewpoint.
Own it. Or if it’s something to be ashamed of… accept the shame.
ai_critic 1 hours ago [-]
Failure to recognize immigration as a problem for a sizeable chunk of the population--rightly or wrongly--ensures that they will fall pray to demagogues and will never again trust those who repeatedly blew them off.
Progressives fuck this up continually across the policy spectrum, by having no answer other than "no you're wrong/immoral/stupid" to people who express concerns in categories that have strong orthodoxy requirements.
OkayPhysicist 49 minutes ago [-]
That's because they are wrong, immoral, and stupid. They're grovelling in the crumbs left over by the rich, and then getting pissed that there are other people groveling for the same crumbs.
Blaming immigrants is easy because you get an immediate base amongst racists (the immoral). They'll perk up at the sound of your dog whistles, and immediately start barking shit like "finally someone had the bravery to say what we're all thinking". That amplification of your message then reaches the reactionaries, who accurately look around at the world that is hell bent on destroying them, but are a little too dense to understand the web of systems that make up that world, and thus are eager for a simple explanation (the stupid). And once your message gets embedded in the zeitgeist from that lot, normal, relatively detached from politics people start hearing all this talk about immigration being a problem, and believe it (the wrong).
The same way you can't be frugal to make up for making poverty wages, you can't shrink the pool of disadvantaged workers to make them advantaged.
dijit 25 minutes ago [-]
Sorry, you speak about this as though you are an American (not sure if you are) but you can't hope to understand the realities of living in a country that just injected 1/10th of its population in a decade.
The demographic of the largest cities in Sweden has changed from 17% foreign born in 1986 to over 55% today- in a single generation. (Malmö, were I live as a migrant myself).
At the same time, the healthcare service is struggling, the police can't cope with the crime situation and there are gangs shooting people and grenades blowing up apartments everywhere.
AND: At the same time, the Geni coefficient remains remarkably low, and income inequality much lower than the US, so this "blame the rich" makes sense in the UK and US, but it's not the problem that Sweden has.
Sweden has mismanaged a lot of its public services (training, then underpaying doctors - leading to them going private, then there being a shortage of doctors which leads to the government paying huge contractor rates for those doctors - which is hugely expensive, so nurses try to avoid you seeing a doctor - which leads to less preventative healthcare, and more serious issues, which is more strain on the healthcare service).
It's not uniquely immigrants fault, they have a role to play in the welfare system and being hugely overrepresented in crime, but it's really not rich peoples fault.
Not in Sweden.
viccis 1 hours ago [-]
Not really, this looks more like pre-1990s leftism that you see from people like Caesar Chavez. Broadly redistributive policies towards the working class and a strict curbing of immigration as a source of exploited labor underclass for corporations to fatten their margins. There's a reason Bernie called open borders a "Koch brothers proposal".
OkayPhysicist 44 minutes ago [-]
There is a very, very, very large gap between "open borders" and "keep all those disgusting foreigners out". I guarantee if you ask the average "immigration control activist" in most countries what the acceptable number of brown people to let into their country is, the answer is zero. Because the most active members of these movements are motivated by racism.
rixed 13 minutes ago [-]
It must feel great to feel so vastly superior...
But everyone being crass and stupid was not even the question. The question was: how many more battles are going to be lost on that hill?
bigyabai 2 hours ago [-]
> We have nurtured a culture of radical tolerance.
Play radical games, win radical prizes. The last place I want my money going is towards radical authoritarianism, a cause that I thought Mullvad would thoroughly oppose.
> Self-censorship out of fear is an even bigger dampener than direct censorship.
Bullshit. Self-censorship is a self-preservation mechanism, a VPN doesn't change the consequences of saying illegal or offensive things. Direct censorship is an abuse of the monopoly on power, and much more inhumane than just feeling insecure about your edgy ideas being attached to your identity.
cryzinger 2 hours ago [-]
The "radical tolerance" thing is also a little ironic, since the biggest controversy with the party that the founder donated to is that the party isn't tolerant of people from different backgrounds or nationalities...
[insert Paradox of Tolerance quote here]
dijit 1 hours ago [-]
Tolerant is the wrong word to choose because tolerant doesn't mean "accepting" it means... to tolerate.
And the most extreme position they have stated is that "it doesn't matter if you're born here, if you commit crimes and don't respect the culture you should probably leave".
That is an extreme position, but it's not as black as people seem to paint it, which implies heavily that the party is just simply racist against non-swedes.
The actual racist party is the second most voted for party in Sweden, I think because of how intolerant the society has been about talking about the issues caused by migration. That is my own opinion though, as a migrant, living in the city with the most migrants in Sweden.
pstuart 1 hours ago [-]
> don't respect the culture
That's where it gets messy, at least in the States.
note: I have family in Sweden that are non-white but I've never discussed the issue as it felt a bit too "delicate"
dijit 1 hours ago [-]
Well, Sweden had to recently ban cousin marriage (it wasn't an issue before) but aside from that (which is a problem for the health service, but not for me personally), there are very differing perspectives towards homosexuality and Womens rights, and it is the second generation that feel most entitled to expressing their dissatisfaction at Swedens attitude towards those topics.
I might be a migrant myself, but I have strong feelings about this too.
'In 2026 Örebro Party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."'
dijit 1 hours ago [-]
It's nice to cherry pick inflammatory things that have been stated without their full context.
The context in this case is that he was directly asked:
"What about the people born in Sweden who commit so many crimes and do not integrate at all, live their whole lives on welfare, as we are seeing in the statistics it is mostly the second-generation who are most represented" (I am adlibbing and translating, but this is the question).
Allard then said, as you put it: that being born here is not protection.
Now, that is an extreme position, nobody else would say such a thing, and to be totally clear: it's not possible in the Swedish constitution to strip someone of citizenship (even if they have a claim to another by blood- which is the most common method of attaining any citizenship btw) - it's also against international law to strip someone of a citizenship to leave them stateless.
However there's only 30,000 people (of 2.1M) foreign born people in Sweden whom are otherwise stateless (Palestinians; Balkans who did not reapply after the fall of Yugoslavia), and there is a huge issue with crime and integration.
There are no solutions, but it's kind of valid for Swedish people to be looking at people to ask difficult and stomach-churning questions in some way.
bsoup 56 minutes ago [-]
Constitutions and laws are no protection for scapegoats once extremists gain power. Anyone who knows 20th century history knows where "we must deport these damn parasites" ends.
If they are called "social welfare-Somalis" (where do social welfare-Swedes get deported to?), if they are not included in "the Swedes" and "our own damn people", if "even if they are born in Sweden, [...] they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish", then integration is not what he wants.
dijit 54 minutes ago [-]
Ok, but then you're saying Sweden is on the hook, in perpetuity, for an entire family tree of a stream of people that seems to never end unless racists take control of migration (which is what has happened now in Sweden).
Honestly, I really understand what you mean, but offering no solution and then talking down anyone who dares talk about it is exactly how extremists got support here in the first place.
If you're not living in sweden please keep in mind: this kind of demographic change is totally unprecedented in all of Europe and in all of history. In less than a 1/3rd of a generation, a decade, 10% of the population of a country was artificially added.
Such a thing has not happened historically unless a country was conquered. -- even then, it took 500 years for Skåne to be Swedish (in fact, many Swedes joke that they're still Danish). Just to say that a cultural shift of such magnitude is going to cause some tension no matter what, nobody has done it at this scale.
To then have those same people and their children, then, cause a disproportionate amount of violent and sexual crime while also being a disproportionate financial cost to the country: absolutely needs some kind of answer.
I'm not saying that Örebro Partiet or SD have that answer, but I sympathise with people who are tired of seeing this happening plainly with their own eyes, and being branded as racists, fascists or nationalists for clumsily trying to talk about it without the right verbiage because they've never had to exercise these kind of thoughts before.
OkayPhysicist 30 minutes ago [-]
The key observation missing from the conversation here is that you're being judged by Americans, where damn near everybody (save ~1% Native Americans) belongs to "an entire family tree" of immigrants. Race relations are one of those things that the US catches a lot of shit for because we've had to deal with it for the entirety of our nation's history, which lets us look at the attitudes alarmingly prevalent in Europe and go, "hey, that's like when my granddaddy was burning crosses in his neighbor's lawn. That's fucked up".
dijit 21 minutes ago [-]
I think the other lesson we could draw from America is that we shouldn't let everyone in, they'll kill us, take our place and feel bad about it a few hundred years later... maybe.
57 minutes ago [-]
FeepingCreature 1 hours ago [-]
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0xy 2 hours ago [-]
Only in Europe could a party with socialist-leaning values on every single issue except immigration be branded 'far right'. This is the case in every single European country for some reason.
Marine Le Pen's party in France leans socialist on econ but is painted as 'far right' for the same reason.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago [-]
The Nazi's were full on socialists, I think it's more that the left-right spectrum is too binary to describe many parties political views.
OkayPhysicist 38 minutes ago [-]
Congrats on falling for hundred year old propaganda. Fascism loves dancing around in the flayed skin of the socialism it violently represses. Go look into what they did to trade unions if you think the Nazis were some Worker's Party.
redsocksfan45 2 hours ago [-]
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truthier 1 hours ago [-]
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truthier 1 hours ago [-]
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actionfromafar 1 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 00:25:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
That said, the fact that the person involved is the founder of this company (not a regular employee) does change things though. I don't know anything about the politics involved, but (with the exception of recent American executives) I would imagine you would want the people who run your company to be more neutral as to prevent controversy (or at least do so quietly).
I want them to be strongly biased in favor of free expression.
But they take my money and use it restrict how people dress, how they pray, what customs they are allowed to follow, what they teach their kids.
The agenda they support is anti-free-expression, and that's worse than neutral.
most people wouldn't even know the controversy happened nor care. with the response, you now trigger various human instincts that draw attention, promote further gossiping and wondering where the fire is with all the smoke.
The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party (118+695 points, last month, 3+1588 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48717469
I can't even find the right words to describe how wrong this sounds to me
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
Obscura by definition is the same or better than Mullvad because of the multi-party relay. Similar with iCloud Private Relay but that's only for Safari which is inadequate.
Nym looks promising but mixnets haven't been tested as much as the Tor network.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party
The party has been variously characterised as left-wing and right-wing, as well as populist, nationalist and conservative.
The message from the CEO about the donation: https://dberntsson.info/And for those who may not be old enough to remember the last time this happened in the techsphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...
Personally I wish people like his had the balls to stop hiding behind that kind of thing, we all know what someone is about when “immigration is the main problem” in their viewpoint.
Own it. Or if it’s something to be ashamed of… accept the shame.
Progressives fuck this up continually across the policy spectrum, by having no answer other than "no you're wrong/immoral/stupid" to people who express concerns in categories that have strong orthodoxy requirements.
Blaming immigrants is easy because you get an immediate base amongst racists (the immoral). They'll perk up at the sound of your dog whistles, and immediately start barking shit like "finally someone had the bravery to say what we're all thinking". That amplification of your message then reaches the reactionaries, who accurately look around at the world that is hell bent on destroying them, but are a little too dense to understand the web of systems that make up that world, and thus are eager for a simple explanation (the stupid). And once your message gets embedded in the zeitgeist from that lot, normal, relatively detached from politics people start hearing all this talk about immigration being a problem, and believe it (the wrong).
The same way you can't be frugal to make up for making poverty wages, you can't shrink the pool of disadvantaged workers to make them advantaged.
The demographic of the largest cities in Sweden has changed from 17% foreign born in 1986 to over 55% today- in a single generation. (Malmö, were I live as a migrant myself).
At the same time, the healthcare service is struggling, the police can't cope with the crime situation and there are gangs shooting people and grenades blowing up apartments everywhere.
AND: At the same time, the Geni coefficient remains remarkably low, and income inequality much lower than the US, so this "blame the rich" makes sense in the UK and US, but it's not the problem that Sweden has.
Sweden has mismanaged a lot of its public services (training, then underpaying doctors - leading to them going private, then there being a shortage of doctors which leads to the government paying huge contractor rates for those doctors - which is hugely expensive, so nurses try to avoid you seeing a doctor - which leads to less preventative healthcare, and more serious issues, which is more strain on the healthcare service).
It's not uniquely immigrants fault, they have a role to play in the welfare system and being hugely overrepresented in crime, but it's really not rich peoples fault.
Not in Sweden.
But everyone being crass and stupid was not even the question. The question was: how many more battles are going to be lost on that hill?
Play radical games, win radical prizes. The last place I want my money going is towards radical authoritarianism, a cause that I thought Mullvad would thoroughly oppose.
> Self-censorship out of fear is an even bigger dampener than direct censorship.
Bullshit. Self-censorship is a self-preservation mechanism, a VPN doesn't change the consequences of saying illegal or offensive things. Direct censorship is an abuse of the monopoly on power, and much more inhumane than just feeling insecure about your edgy ideas being attached to your identity.
[insert Paradox of Tolerance quote here]
And the most extreme position they have stated is that "it doesn't matter if you're born here, if you commit crimes and don't respect the culture you should probably leave".
That is an extreme position, but it's not as black as people seem to paint it, which implies heavily that the party is just simply racist against non-swedes.
The actual racist party is the second most voted for party in Sweden, I think because of how intolerant the society has been about talking about the issues caused by migration. That is my own opinion though, as a migrant, living in the city with the most migrants in Sweden.
That's where it gets messy, at least in the States.
note: I have family in Sweden that are non-white but I've never discussed the issue as it felt a bit too "delicate"
I might be a migrant myself, but I have strong feelings about this too.
'In 2026 Örebro Party leader Markus Allard sparked controversy on several occasions. In a debate hosted by Studio3 with Liberal member of parliament Martin Melin, Allard asked: "why won't the Liberals push for deporting 100 000 social welfare-Somalis?" and in the same debate said that "Sweden belongs to the Swedes. We have to make sure that we take care of our own damn people and we must deport these damn parasites who sit and live at our expense."
In a podcast segment about immigration and deportations Allard stated his opinion and said that "They will also be forced to leave, even if they are born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish."'
The context in this case is that he was directly asked:
"What about the people born in Sweden who commit so many crimes and do not integrate at all, live their whole lives on welfare, as we are seeing in the statistics it is mostly the second-generation who are most represented" (I am adlibbing and translating, but this is the question).
Allard then said, as you put it: that being born here is not protection.
Now, that is an extreme position, nobody else would say such a thing, and to be totally clear: it's not possible in the Swedish constitution to strip someone of citizenship (even if they have a claim to another by blood- which is the most common method of attaining any citizenship btw) - it's also against international law to strip someone of a citizenship to leave them stateless.
However there's only 30,000 people (of 2.1M) foreign born people in Sweden whom are otherwise stateless (Palestinians; Balkans who did not reapply after the fall of Yugoslavia), and there is a huge issue with crime and integration.
There are no solutions, but it's kind of valid for Swedish people to be looking at people to ask difficult and stomach-churning questions in some way.
If they are called "social welfare-Somalis" (where do social welfare-Swedes get deported to?), if they are not included in "the Swedes" and "our own damn people", if "even if they are born in Sweden, [...] they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedish", then integration is not what he wants.
Honestly, I really understand what you mean, but offering no solution and then talking down anyone who dares talk about it is exactly how extremists got support here in the first place.
If you're not living in sweden please keep in mind: this kind of demographic change is totally unprecedented in all of Europe and in all of history. In less than a 1/3rd of a generation, a decade, 10% of the population of a country was artificially added.
Such a thing has not happened historically unless a country was conquered. -- even then, it took 500 years for Skåne to be Swedish (in fact, many Swedes joke that they're still Danish). Just to say that a cultural shift of such magnitude is going to cause some tension no matter what, nobody has done it at this scale.
To then have those same people and their children, then, cause a disproportionate amount of violent and sexual crime while also being a disproportionate financial cost to the country: absolutely needs some kind of answer.
I'm not saying that Örebro Partiet or SD have that answer, but I sympathise with people who are tired of seeing this happening plainly with their own eyes, and being branded as racists, fascists or nationalists for clumsily trying to talk about it without the right verbiage because they've never had to exercise these kind of thoughts before.
Marine Le Pen's party in France leans socialist on econ but is painted as 'far right' for the same reason.