Proton Mail sponsoring french Far Right influencer on Youtube (post updated with Proton's reponse)
Video description explicitly mentions a partnership (not just affiliate link) + 2min 20s segment embedded in the video.
The person in question: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Lapierre
User Lumpy_Carpet9877 shares more info:
Vincent Lapierre’s Wikipedia page is quite explicit about his far-right positioning and includes numerous sources. He worked for several years for a far-right organization founded by Alain Soral, which promotes anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying, conspiracist, sexist, masculinist, transphobic, and homophobic ideas, and who fled to Russia to escape justice.
He is close to Dieudonné) (a Holocaust denier). He founded Le Média pour tous, a far-right website that particularly targets anti-fascists and defenders of Jewish rights. He has always been close to conspiracist circles
I'll add that if you dare venture on his youtube channel (at the risk of ruining your suggestion algorithm like I did to provide the screenshot), you'll see that most videos are typical far right content / talking points
Update: read Proton's response below
You're right to raise this, and we want to address it directly and provide you important context on how this happened.
Vincent Lapierre's channel should never have been part of our affiliate and sponsorship program, because we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community.
Proton operates globally, and while our services are available to everyone regardless of political views and our mission is consistent everywhere, our knowledge of every local media landscape is not. In this case, our team didn't have enough context about the French space to make a well-informed decision, and that's on us.
We also want to be straight about what a placement like this is and isn't. An affiliate or sponsorship arrangement is a transactional placement for awareness, not an endorsement of a creator's views. In the case of Vincent Lapierre, this was a single video sponsorship, not a partnership.
But that distinction doesn't excuse what happened here. The responsibility to vet who we put our name next to is ours, and we didn't meet it this time. We're now reviewing our vetting process and our guidelines for our marketing agencies to ensure this doesn't happen again.
If you see something like this again, tell us. We rely on your feedback and vigilance."
Hes in their partner program which anyone can sign up to from what I saw, not being directly sponsored.
Yeah, checked out the link and it's just a sign up for proton mail. He probably just signed up for their partner program and Proton has put in zero effort into seeing who signs up.
How dare you suggest tech journalism isn't just trying to sensationalize a nothing burger without doing more than 10 minutes of research??
Not worth the post. The guy just automatically got their link.
Proton did say "we intentionally avoid association with channels whose content could distract from our message and divide our community," which is the exact opposite of your claim.
Seems like a decent response to me.
Except for this bit:
Bitch you're like a billion dollar company, rely on doing your own homework.
You're right that we should hold companies to account and expect them to do homework. Vigilance is good. Let's extend that vigilance to monitoring Proton too. I think they'd approve of that.
Below is some stuff I think is interesting, but that is tangential and not intended as either endorsement or condemnation of Proton. (All intended in good faith!)
Your comment prompted me to look up their finances. For anyone interested, Proton AG seems to be valued at about 300 million (https://getlatka.com/companies/protonmail). However, I didn't realize they are majority owned by a non-profit.
Some personal reflection, I am a French citizen living outside France (dual national). I had not heard of this guy. I probably should have. This is the kind of low awareness that makes me feel guilty about voting in the FR elections.
You're probably more aware of the damage those fascists can do because you live abroad. And still more aware of reality than the millions of idiots watching CNews.
Please don't skip the vote next year, it'll be a tough one...
Proton responded: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1u05xs2/comment/oqgihvq/
Thank you! I'll update the post
Apparently this is a false alarm.
For all those going off on being negative about Proton based on an ambiguous post, this is the best explanation of Proton's political position: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
😔😔😔
I'm willing to give Proton a fair amount of the benefit of the doubt (albeit a little less after the Trump-endorsing antitrust tweet by Yen a few years ago), but this is a baffling set of statements.
"The type of people we pay to plug our services doesn't indicate that we endorse their message. I mean, obviously it does, but we don't care enough to manage it closely."
I still don't understand what was wrong with that.
He called a very specific, very pro anti-trust decision (made for all the wrong reasons, but that's besides the point), a good thing.
People started calling him a Nazi.
I just don't get it...
Strange, I remember a lot more than you do.
https://archive.ph/quYyb
Is that supposed to counter my arguments somehow?
Yes. This official statement from the Proton corporate account is worse, and from a higher position of authority than the CEO's personal account.
I find you exhibit a lot of apparent ignorance. I hope that's just coincidence.
Mate, what are you on about?
Proton support cases, not political sides. Yes, in the bit you quoted, they bashed Dems and praised Reps for... supporting their case. How does that go against anything I said about them?
Mate, they were lying about the side. Unless you want to tell me they were either lying or incredibly stupid, your statement is nonsensical.
I'm sorry, you're not making any sense to me. Maybe a language barrier?
What side? Are you saying that they've been secretly supporting right-wing agenda through over a decade of supporting left-right-a-centre projects, as long as they've aligned with their very specific agenda? And, after all that time, they accidentally tripped and got outed by supporting a random dude in France?
Imagine praising Hitler for his amazing art and being surprised by the negative reactions
This was after Trump 1.0 and before the insurrection. So it's more like: "Imagine praising private Hitler in the trenches for his amazing art and then being surprised by negative reactions 30 years later".
Many people have no critical thinking left now. They just swing wildly from outrage to outrage, cancelling things left and right every other week and retreating further into the little safe space bubble they've created for themselves. Algorithmic social media and internet addiction has trained their brains to behave like this normally, so expecting them to slow down and find some nuance in a discussion is unfortunately too much to ask. You can't talk to these people anymore, until they unplug and detox they will remain on outrage culture autopilot 24/7.
Ah, yeah, I'm not saying that. I didn't like that it was a blatant public licking of Trump's boot, and I didn't like his intimation that the GOP is now the bastion of small tech businesses (as if the massive open bribes by tech leaders to Trump weren't happening, and as if the GOP hadn't led the fight against net neutrality).
Stating that a good decision was a good decision equals licking the boot. Got it.
At the time, the Democrats defaulted to oppose everything the GOP was doing, which - at the time - meant standing up in defence of Meta, Musk, TikTok, and similar, because Trump was throwing a hissy fit and - completely accidentally - forcing his people to make a lot of good legislation against massive corporations.
Meaning: at the time the Dems were pro-big business, and the GOP were - for all the wrong reasons and accidentally - pro consumer.
Nobody was saying anything about "small business".
Net neutrality is a completely unrelated issue that the Proton people have stood for countless times.
You've got more energy for this conversation than I have, I'm afraid! My general feeling is that you're understating the platform and the tone of the post, and the political climate in which the statement was made, and that Yen did much the same when he posted it, but I won't pursue this further.
Nah. Yen, and Proton in general, have been extremely consistent throughout the years. Promoting Net Neutrality, privacy, anti-monopoly, and anti-trust efforts.
Sometimes they praise the Left, if they do things that strengthen these things, sometimes they praise the Right. That's all there is to it.
And, again, at the time there was nothing really malicious about supporting Trump. Sure, he was a moron, but he wasn't doing anything outright fascist/totalitarian - the tweet was from December 2024, all of that shit went down starting on January 6th.
Yeah who could have seen the authoritarianism coming in 2024?
Nobody could have possibly known!
The majority of the time youtube sponsorships have almost no where near enough over-site into who they are sponsoring. Its commonly a shotgun approach. Hell half the time companies arn't even doing it driectly but going though a middle man company that sends out the emails and all they have to do is sorta review it once and a while to make sure that company is doing their job.
It's extremely obvious this is yet again another great example of that. The number of times companies have found themselves sponsoring someone they don't agree with or would never do in any other circumstances is staggering on youtube. It's basically a running joke at this point.
This is basically a fat fucking nothing burger beyond "yet again a company fucks up due to language barriers and poor management." Honestly i wouldnt be half surprised if they review their process fix it and then it goes right back to being half broken in 6 weeks.
Its basically youtube sponsership 101 at this point.
oversight
Exactly. I don't think any reasonable person can expect that a relatively small company knows and understands the ins-and-outs of every country's political spectrum.
Especially because, like you noted, they mostly do that through third parties. And a third party might be super comfortable supporting someone like that. How often does anyone pay enough attention to call them out on it?
Yeah. Never mind last time.
At first glance I thought that was Billy Mays
RIP
Decent response but they need to do better.
Their response sounds like what AI would say when it's called out.
They should do better and they should make public what they'll do so it won't happen again
Oh? Doesn't seem like that to me at all. In fact, it was a pretty decent response.
They admitted they were wrong, what corrective action will they take?
This is it. Saying "that's on us" and then saying "keep telling us, we rely on you" shows no real change in behaviour, it mostly amounts to a "oops, made a booboo, better say something to make the cross people less cross".
Did I hallucinate this or are you intentionally ignoring the very specific action they said they were taking to address this?
Yeah, I also thought this sounds very AI generated. I'm still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt though
Proton has started advertising on leftist channels within the last month or two, which doesn't make Proton leftist. IMO, what it really means is that there is greater distrust between political views - we got rightwing crazies wanting to ICE people, and so naturally their minority opposition wants more privacy. In turn, the crazies also need to cover their own ass, so they use VPNs to hide their search results of [insert local school, minority, or individual here] from potential leaking to government.
Point being, such fear and hatred is a good opportunity for arms to be supplied to every side. Those arms, in this case, being encrypted privacy. Proton is being pragmatic.
Link to article?
Did Claude write this though? i can't tell between Claude and corporate speech.
Proton should clarify their relationship with this idiot because it stinks a lot. But I can't say I'm surprised by what Proton has done in the past.
I'm OOTL, what has Proton done in the past? Friends of mine routinely recommend Proton, so I'd be interested in hearing about their negative history.
CEO praised Trump admin on one particular thing, I forget what.
And it turned out they were right and that one particular person was fired for refusing to comply with Trump admin BS.
That's kind of nice to hear.
You have some links handy by any chance? I don't really follow US politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/12/us-antitrust-gail-slater-ousted-trump-administration
Thanks!
That ofc makes this company inpossible to support, I will self-host everything with 321 redundancy now, like any sane person does
I emailed them and asked for clarification.
I'm not familiar with this guy, is there a US equivalent he could be compared to?
Ehhhh it's hard to have an accurate comparison but I guess he's around the same age and have the same vibes as say someone like Nick Fuentes
Ah, yes. Explain the world based on its center of the universe. Smart. /s
Looked to me like they were just asking for a reference point.
Exactly. I'm not at all familiar with French youtubers, and I'm a bit puzzled by the downvotes.
Proton bots apparently
That question is equivalent to someone in Europe or Australia or wherever asking who their equivalent would be to a right-wing US politician.
Don't be that guy.
It's just that people here in the US can't seem to realize the rest of the world don't necessarily know what their politician relates to in the US. Don't be that guy.
That is absolutely a valid point. But there is no need to be rude about it.
Rude is subjective. I was speaking plainly.
No you weren't. And since you wanna bring "subjective" vs "objective" into it:
This shining example of a comment of yours is called "being a smartass", which is objectively rude.
Source: am a parent of 5 kids, including teenagers. I have heard that piss-poor excuse to be rude more times than I can count now.
Parents online are like the vegan meme at this point, always have to insert their parenting into a conversation as if it means anything.
Passive language and some specific phrases show the LLM in the proton response. None of what Proton says is meant.
Its not news to me that the people at proton have no morals but its still cringe every time shit like this happens.
Remember the person who Yen publicly supported that was part of the Trump admin? That person got fired for not bending to Trump's will.
The more I see shit like this come up, the more I realize this might be just an ongoing smear campaign against Proton. Not saying they're perfect, but this is excessive.
Bro its a capitalist corporation like any other, why would they have morals? Also being part of the Trump admin in the first place is enough of a problem.
Proton?
Proton is headed by a non-profit, Proton A.G., where Andy makes up only 1 of 5 board members. Another board member is none other than Tim Berners-Lee - the literal inventor of the internet as you know it.
Everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.
Proton AG is a for profit company. Its controlled by the non profit Proton Foundation, but that has no real meaning. They are not required to run in a non profit way just because the decisions come from people on a non profit board. Its literally just a subscription based tech company, why are people simping so hard for them?
Bot brained people here just like Reddit, simping for the same companies that eventually turn into monopolies.
Same type of people that hype stuff like bluesky
lying whores, take people signed up under him and remove special then, fucking lying cunts
Well well well… if it isn’t what we’ve been screaming this whole time
It’s always the ones you most suspect
Not sure why you're being down voted. Proton's owner has long been known to be right leaning. However, this appears to just be an automated ad.
They are being downvoted because not only is this not a proper sponsorship - they grabbed a partener program link which AFAIK basically anyone can do. Proton is also not right leaning nor do they have a history of politically supporting such political figures. Yes, the CEO had that one tweet, no that one tweet does not make them right leaning. Anyone who thinks so is just reactionary, baiting, or being mislead.
Edit: proton appears to be working on an official response according to their reddit account. Edit2: proton response here: https://i.redd.it/6eac1cs9n26h1.jpeg Tl;Dr: they do have controls to keep them from being associated with political entities but those controls failed and they are working on it, while making sure to cut ties with this individual.
Didn't I say that in the message you replied to? Still, I don't think this person needs to be dogpiled.
Hes literally rage baiting and spreading misinfomation. He deserves a smack up side the back of his head from a dissapointed father while his mother tsktsks at him.
Parents who hit their kids are certified trash, just like the Epstein Class they vote for. Sorry your shit parents hit you, but that’s not normal, ever.