Daniel Berntsson, founder of Mullvad, gave a personal donation of 5 million SEK (roughly 450,000€) in 2025 to Örebropartiet. This enormous donation accounted for 72% of the party’s revenue in 2025.
How does this affect Mullvad’s legitimacy as a company advocating for a free and open internet, while also funding a political party whose agenda seem to contradict these values? The official party website (in Swedish) can be found via the link below.
disgusting? yes
surprising? no
libertarians and borderline-criminals have always shared the privacy space with anti-capitalist lefties, since before the Bolsheviks bulk-ordered their red shirts.
Apparently they’ve now posted a response:
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.
In context, this seems…tone-deaf. “It’s okay! Immigrants are welcome to work for Mullvad even if the founders ‘dislike’ them.” Yikes.
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.
I would argue that those three things aren’t even all on the same level, and that’s without even addressing the fucking fascism of ‘re-migration’ policies.
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.
Unless you were smart enough to pay anonymously, in which case you’re welcome to doxx yourself, I guess.
Wondering if it’s time that we as a progressive left community, establish our own VPN…
Anything shared here would inevitably be (or become) a honeypot. If you want a community-driven VPN, it would need to be something like Tor. Individual nodes being hosted by the community, and a zero-trust system to ensure no single node sees enough traffic to ID users.
But the issue with this is that a malicious actor (like the government) could simply spin up enough nodes to be able to capture the system. A zero-trust system like Tor is only secure because it is large. It’s not economical for a single actor to run enough nodes to reliably capture all three connections in the chain. But if it’s a small group (like Lemmy) starting up their own system, then it would be trivial for a larger organization to simply outnumber the two or three dozen safe nodes.
RiseUp VPN already exists. I trust that they aren’t feds but I also assume the feds have snuck some sort of spyware on them asap.
So… A honeypot?
If it’s a honeypot for fascists but not one for antifascists, maybe. But I’d prefer no honeypot at all, rather one where governance is from the labourers, to the labourers.
Soo, TOR but without the multiple nodes and CIA?
A VPN operated exclusively for a single political group would flag everyone using it as that group.
True, I suppose a VPN operated by those supporting that group, then.
Not a honeypot, but a target. I see.
Im sorry, but people here in the comments seem to be complaining to complain. If both Mullvad and Proton are known to fund/support fascist parties, then what do you suggest we leftists use? And dont just blindly recommend eastern spyware VPNs either. Maybe we just go back to distributing newspapers and using radio, just like our comrades back then did
I use AirVPN, personally. They put money where the mouth is and haven’t donated to any Nazis either.
Anyone have experience with iVPN? I’ve generally heard it’s good, but I’m not sure how it compares. Looks like it’s the same price as Mullvad at least, and also accepts cash and monero as payment options. I’m just wondering about how many servers they have comparable and how often they got blocked by major websites. I’m thinking that’ll probably be what I switch to, unless it has some major problems I’m not aware of.
I is… okay if you’re doing piracy or trying to watch foreign media. It will keep the eyes of your isp off you but hasn’t been under the extensive scrutiny that mullvad has (which is why it can be used for such a broad set of goals imo).
When I used it I ended up having to switch servers frequently, that was about three years ago though.
Seems like they have far fewer servers than Mullvad does, but at least they state who they’re hosted with and it looks like they do have a multi-hop setup like Mullvad does. They undergo annual audits so I’m not seeing any major security red flags. I frankly would have stuck with Mullvad had they not pulled this shit, but I won’t be made a hypocrite over this.
If you get spooked, don’t worry about being made a hypocrite. Your security is worth more than your moral purity.
And dont just blindly recommend eastern spyware VPNs either
Do these even exist? Who gives a shit if the PRC spies on me? I’d happily use a North Korean VPN if they had IPs that weren’t geoblocked.
Proton since it is cheaper than Mullvad I guess
Bruh Proton never gave money to fascist parties. In fact, if you look at their donations, they’re all left wing.
They may be talking about the CEO being on Trump’s dick, though that’s just a guess.
Proton voiced support for Trump
So I’m definitely not familiar with swedish politics, but does this site actually represent the entire party? The party site is just a very vague description of some group of people that sound like they’re anti left and anti right at the same time. The Wikipedia article on the party doesn’t really help make sense to what they expect to accomplish, but again that could just be my ignorance to it.
Would love to know more about all this, with more reliable sources if possible (vs a website that just says something without really providing sources). Mullvad is about trying to protect privacy with fighting big brother, and I’m really not seeing anything about the party that indicates it wants the opposite.
They’re practicing the rhetoric strategy known as Bonapartism, which is when you claim to be neither left nor right, but a third way, which is nonsensical as realistically you gotta stand for something. As for this party’s actual views, they’re social fascists (socialdemocracy for me, fascism for thee). They’re wildly racist.
note that this is a local party, and as such their policies are focused on their local area only. apparently they plan to be on the national ballot this year but i’ve not seen any policy changes to reflect that. reading from an interview the founder did in 2022, he had to start his own branch of the left party youth wing because there wasn’t one where he lived, and as soon as they became official he found out that they didn’t like his opinions so he was forced out. as for what those opinions are…
– Vi började fråga oss vad som var relevant i människors vardag. Är radikalfeminismen relevant? Nej. Är frågan om hur många kön som finns relevant? Nej. Är gamla mossiga resonemang om huruvida Sovjet var en arbetarstat relevant? Nej.
Han upprördes av skatteslöseri och kommunala skrytprojekt som genomfördes samtidigt som utanförskapet växte.
– Jag tog frågan till nutid. Vilken klass tjänar egentligen på den förda migrationspolitik som lett till utanförskap och kriminalitet?
“we started asking ourselves what was relevant in the daily lives of people. Is radical feminism relevant? No. Is the question of how many genders there are relevant? No. Are tired old arguments on whether the Soviet Union was a worker-led state relevant? No.”
He was upset by wasted tax money and bragadocious projects the local government spearheaded while social exclusion kept growing.
“I brought the question to present day. What class makes money from the immigration policies that have led to exclusion and criminality?”
He’s coined a term for the class of people he says are the main tax money wasters; “transferiat”, as in the macroeconomic concept of transfer payments. these people, he says, just profit from the system without adding value. as examples, he lists “genusvetare, mångfaldsstrateger, HBTQI-certifikatörer [,] i viss mån även journalister (inom public service). Det finns även ett lägre skikt av transferiatet – de bidragsberoende, framför allt den stora massan av arbetslösa invandrare som kommit att hamna i utanförskapsområden”: gender studies graduates, diversity strategists, LGBTQ-certifiers, journalists in publicly funded media, and unemployed immigrants.
…honestly i was with him for a while there. i thought he was gonna go on a tirade against “bullshit jobs”, but instead he went off the deep end. later on he cites “public art” and “community centers in areas where more limmigrants live” as a waste of taxpayer money.
Sounds like at “best” NazBol, at worst just Nazi.
Dang, Mullvad instantly loses its credibility of the go to lemmy shill VPN overnight.
If people were shilling for Mullvad, then they wouldn’t give a shit about this would they?
I use Kaspersky VPN, from Russia, part of BRICS. The Global South lives on its own work, unlike the Global North, who kills and robs the Global South.
I remember all the FUD about their anti-virus back in the day, even though it consistently tested the best. I didn’t know they had a VPN. I’ll have to look into it.
Edit: website says “purchase is unavailable for US customers”. I’m sure that’s the US government’s doing and not their own choice, if I had to guess.
So instead of American or European spyware, you instead use Russian spyware :)
Living in America, I’d rather give my data to Russia or China, if I lived in one of those countries, it would be the other way around. The US and Europe have more leverage over my life, so I’d rather give them less about myself.
I’ll give you that, what you’re saying makes sense, but in an ideal world, we don’t have to give our data to any government… only in our dreams though…
Yeah, it’s unhinged across the board, for sure. I’m doing what I can to own my data and control as much of it as possible, but it is a full time chore if I also want to have a life in this time and age.
On the brighter side, that has led to me spending more time with family and friends in person, outside (hoping not to be recorded 🤣).
Av vänstern anklagas vi för att vara fascister och av högern anklagas vi för kommunism
Accused of being fascists from the political left and communist from the political right…not exactly a reassuring description IMO.
Accused of being Nationalist from the left and being Socialist from the right. What a novel idea. A nEw PoLiTiCaL tHiRd WaY!
Calling nonwhite migrants “parasites” is a pretty clear signal which end of the spectrum they’re actually on.
So nobody can agree if they’re far-left or far-right, but everyone agrees they’re far-authoritarian?
Seems like it yeah
So, they’re socialists, only national?
so like, national socialists. who do we know who also called themselves that?
Well, the political right calls anyone to the left of Mussolini a communist, so we can safely assume they’re wrong here.
A VPN does not protect the user from the type of sophisticated mass-surveillance that exists now and will only become increasingly more sophisticated without political critique. Users who are confused about the criticism of a capitalist-company when its benefactors are known to further entrench a beneficial political-ideology are simpletons who do not grasp the relationship between the Western-democracies and its political mass-surveillance organs that go on to spawn the private-surveillance companies that do get public critique (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir, et al.).
No, a VPN is not better than nothing. Do more. Do better. Adopt real solutions like GNUnet. Liberate your computers with free software.
inb4 simpletons just want to use a VPN to watch mah netflix. Ok boomer.
you misspelled yggdrasil
gnunet
So, anyone that doesn’t have the technical expertise to start moving to a more private online experience is a simpleton. Thanks for clearing that up for all of us simpletons. GNUnet is nowhere near ready to even begin to be a part of anyone’s digital life, ansd the developers say so themselves:
Please be aware that this project is still in an early alpha stage when it comes to running software – its not an easy task to rewrite the whole Internet!
While it’s great to put the word out hoping that more people gets involved, vexing others has the opposite outcome.
All this to say, fuck you, get off of your high horse.
Points for mentioning a solution, but being condisending and talking down to people isn’t a great way to get them excited about becoming involved. It’s better to let people in on the joke rather than make them the joke.
Mentions GNU
Condescending asshole about it
You wouldn’t believe it
Yes. I am just tired, comrade. Once can argue about the tone, but the reality is there needs to be a rectification on computer-education on a scale that only a government can enact. I can not do it. I can just rebuke.
Juvenile views do need to be rebuked. If you believe you can regain a portion of control back via payment to an entity, whilst still living in ignorance of the substrate you wish to increase control over you are a moron. You are merely paying for a belief.
I can not understand the user’s insistence on ignorance. All the users here are aware, to differing degrees, of the abuses that are inflicted on them due to this ignorance, yet there is a crowd who adamantly refuse to use their eyes; they wish merely to do the same things they were doing before, with no change in their own behaviors. They will continue to be abused.
I think the reality is they have no interest in the topic.
A VPN has its place in the security stack that should be everyone’s goal. I would genuinely be impressed if you could tell me how a VPN or any other layer in that stack works.
Wao, you apparently know what ‘substrate’ means. You must be a genius. Such a condescending prick.
You use a vpn to watch netflix, i use vpn to watch porn, we are not the same /s
I think entertainment is a very low priority. Pushed to comment on the topic I would say it’s actually a great waste of time, regardless of political orientation.
It’s isolating and manipulative. It subverts the local culture and brainwashes the viewer into believing that what is seen often on the screen is a reflection of real life norms. It is not, but when the majority of a citizenry consume so much foreign media it does shift real cultural norms. This is the soft-power of cultural products created for export.
Turn America’s netflix off. Turn off whatever pornography you preference. Move your body. Get some sunshrine and play with your comrades.
I genuinely believe television was a mistake. I can not see anything of its legacy to feel warm towards; there is no good here.
I totally agree with you. I cant sit and watch tv and never have been able to. I think we need to go to more person to person interactions. We never needed phones, it just became “essential” because everyone wanted one after someone else got one, it was the “new shiny thing”, but it only served as the catalyst for our own prisons.
Thanks for the heads up. Switching to Proton because of this. Mullvad has been bad lately anyways with most of their servers getting blocked every where.
The only thing keeping me on them was their reputation of being a bit less cooky than Proton but this pushed me over the edge
Proton’s CEO praised Trump, just saying. There’s IVPN which is Gibraltese.
Proton CEO praised something Trump did which isn’t a great look but debateable.
That’s wayyy less bad than Mullvad donating $500k to a Nazi party which advocates for remigration.
It’s not just praise though, Proton claimed Trump was standing up for the little guys which is rich considering that the fascist is a billionnaire, supporting the wealthiest to repress the labourers even more. And besides that, it’s also insane.
Hitler was somewhat an environmentalist, but cheering on Hitler for being that is insane, because that is ignoring all the other heinous shit he did.
Proton did not claim anything; the CEO of Proton claimed that Republicans (not Trump) would do better on big tech anti-trust.
This view is not that crazy given that the person Trump appointed was doing her job quite well. Too well to the point that Trump removed her from the position later on.
Bullshit, Trump is the most big tech and corrupt claimant to Usonian president since a hefty while.
And Trump IS what the RINOs are nowadays, those that the pro-fascist CEO praised. Republicans are those like Bill Weld and Charlie Baker from Massachusetts.
What’s worse, cheering on something Hitler did or donating to Hitler?
I keep hearing about that praise, yet never once have I seen proof of it. Maybe I’m just using the wrong search engine. Might need to Google this.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
it came as a surprise last month when Proton CEO Andy Yen praised the Republican Party in a post on X, declaring that “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” When the tweet went viral, Proton’s official Reddit account posted a now-deleted comment stating that “Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.”
In response to a request for comment, Proton reiterated the claim that it is a “politically neutral organization,” then went on to state that “regardless of one’s views about the wider Republication platform, if you agree that action is needed on antitrust then the appointment of Gail Slater is a positive thing,” referring to President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Proton further stated that “Big Tech CEOs are tripping over themselves to kiss the ring precisely because Trump represents an unprecedented challenge to their monopolistic dominance.”
have you validated the statements of the article, or do you just outright believe it?
if not, that’s a weakness with which you can be made to hate all the useful privacy tools.
What is validating according to you, personally traveling to the guy and asking him?
this is just one rando saying something on the internet!
okay, then lets hate everyone, you can trust nobody, because I say everyone is nazi or some other undesirable, there’s no one without ulterior motives, trust me bro. look even linus torvalds is nazi! look he still lives in the USA, and I have insider knowledge about a secret donation he made to trump! no you can’t check it anywhere, just trust me, look my account is 3 years old, super legitimate. instead use my super cleaned out distribution of windows 11, leave your CIA bugged linux behind, and you can sign up to my services because no where else but here you will be safe! pinky promises. if you let the community be divided like that, here you go.
So you’re saying the guy didn’t donate $500.000 to a Nazi party and the article just made it up?
yes. until we have
furtherevidence, we shouldn’t take this at face value.or do you have a reason to believe this is not likely a smear campaign?
Well, fuck your cancel culture, commies!
Regardless of what this dumb party is, it’s first and foremost a donation by a private person. Who happens to run Mullvad. So in the medium term this should have no bearing on the company and how it operates from their point of view. The article hints at disagreement on the board about many things. So if this news story turns into subscribers leaving by the thousands, I would sooner think the “generous” donor might be pushed or bought out.
The tech sector is run by people too. Some of them are mad. Our modern outrage economy demands drastic and public knee jerk reactions to be on the good side. If you’re considering leaving Mullvad, voice your concerns to them first. Put pressure on and wait and see for a bit. If they all turn out to be Nazis in trenchcoats, by all means leave. But they could correct this internally (push out/buyout) and then there is no need to destroy an otherwise okay VPN provider just because one of the founders turned into meatball Melon Usk.
I don’t use Mullvad but I have used Proton VPN and am now using AirVPN. It’s my experience that if you’re using VPN to stream Netflix content or the iPlayer from the UK, you’ll be equally sol on other providers because the streamers have gotten better at spotting and defending against VPNs. So switching in a huff may still leave you disappointed as well.
Stop streaming. Put your VPN to work the right way.
Yeah, the only issue is that any profits from paying for their service will eventually line the person’s pockets. It’s not like the company is directly doing it, or spreading the bullshit.
Makes it a slightly different issue, but it is still an issue
I mean, moderates are invariably SuperHitler, especially in Scandinavia where their social welfare is synonymous with creating apartheid, but I don’t see why that would bother most Lemmy users :0
How did 9+ people even parse this comment?
Twitter did us in you see
I do not find their program on the web. They say they will publish before summer.
Any other official document about their political stances besides that really vague introduction they do on their website?
So, now everyone’s going to hate Mullvad like they do Proton bc of personal decisions by the CEO??
Not weighing in on their politics, but yes and they should. It’s called voting with your wallet. Where do you think the CEO gets the money to fund their politics? They don’t work for free. By continuing to use that service it’s tacitly okaying the CEOs choice.
Money is power.
“When you vote with your wallet, those with the fattest wallets will be the drivers of effective change.” - Cory Doctrow probably quoting someone else
Not to say that making moral choices is useless, but kidding yourself into believing that by not consuming anything touched by bad people, the world will change into something better. Or in this case, Mullvad’s CEO will change his politics. “Voting with your wallet” is a fairytale told to liberals to give them the illusion of power. Money is power, but only if you have enough of it.
They donated a little over 500k usd. Mullvad is $5 a month.
A hundred thousand users would have to drop them to equal the donation, and likely several orders of magnitude more would have to drop them in order to equal the amount of the donation when we factor in what percentage of that $5 goes into the ceos pocket.
If you are correct that money is power then the users don’t have any power to effect changes to this situation.
I think you’re also making a misstep blaming the users of the service for that ceos use of their money. Should now every individual shopper be expected to have an understanding of how the individual members of the owning class each shape the world around them and each shopper bring their political will to bear through the dollars and cents they dole out in the produce section?
“Hmm, bananas are on sale and I could stock up on spices with what I save but on the other hand I don’t like the dole corporation…” preposterous!
Even if you thought the above statement wasn’t absurd, putting expression of politics in the marketplace is choosing to fight on a battlefield tilted entirely in the favor of the wealthy. Consider who will have the advantage when money is political speech, will it be the absurdly wealthy who command vast sums, control the materiel of capital, collude to manipulate the very world we live in and rub elbows with each other on the weekends or will it be a bunch of people choosing apples or bananas?
No ethical consumption is invoked for a reason and this is the reason.
Even if you were a dyed in the wool liberal who truly believes history is over, did you expect the privacy store to be run by someone who shares your politics? People who feel they need privacy might be members of a wide range of ideologies that are outside the mainstream.
Okay? So a hundred thousand users can drop the service. “You’re just a small drop in the bucket” is the same bullshit mentality used everywhere that has gotten the world into a lot of the problems it’s in now.
If everybody does their small part, it’s done pretty quick. If everyone sits around going “oh, there’s no ethical consumption” and accepted defeat, literally nothing changes.
Unions are built entirely on speed together strong.
Yes don’t make it the only battlefield but if you strongly disagree with the CEO, giving him more money is a problem. There’s no way around that.
Relevant watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYHvrd7Gwqg
I wrote that several orders of magnitude more than a hundred thousand users would have to drop the service to equal the amount of the donation under the logic that only a small percentage of the monthly payment of each user goes into the ceos pocket.
With that out of the way, the idea that I’m suggesting throwing your hands up and saying there’s nothing you can do is a wild extrapolation completely manufactured by you.
Successful boycotts are always accompanied by a program of political action that takes place outside the marketplace. Do not fight in the marketplace, you cannot win there. Boycotts are a form of recruitment that takes place in the marketplace because so much of our social interaction has been condensed to economics.
Boycotts in support of unions are always performed alongside a strike, work stoppage or other direct action, never by themselves. The intent is not to nickel and dime the absurdly wealthy company into compliance but to communicate support for the direct action in the marketplace that we all have to interact with to live.
But how does this impact what the op is about?
There is no direct action going on. There is no competing product (mullvad occupies a very unique position amongst VPNs. I’m not aware of any service that offers what they do with the security posture they have and the history of responding to power at the highest level that they have), and if you know of one I’m interested to hear about it. The boycotter would have to simply go without as opposed to turning to an equivalent competitor. To what end? Would that change the ceos political opinions, which are considered middle of the road in their fascist country of residence?
Declaring a battle on ground you cannot succeed upon to achieve nothing of importance only sacrifices the well being and willingness of those who would take action.
There are only so many good privacy options out there. So being choosy with services isn’t a luxury many can afford.
I think you should all be less trusting of western tech companies that strictly use infrastructure in countries that the CIA would feel comfortable hanging out & torturing people to death in
Is this not itself a geopolitical statement? Do we judge everything by indidual choices, or acknowledge the place of individuals in a wider structure they may not be entirely aware of?
You add up all we know about 5/14 eyes, comprador states, you couldn’t get a better list of CIA-compatible nations than the Mullvad server picker
Let’s just stop for a second. Cyprus? Israel? Ukraine? I know the justification. But cmon
Yes bit ironically I will switch to Proton since its cheaper and now equal to Mullvad anyway
