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GrapheneOS Foundation Discusses History Of Phoney Privacy Companies Targeting The Project - Lemmy
lemmy.mlThere are at least a dozen people spending at least several hours attacking
GrapheneOS across platforms on a daily basis. It’s a very strange situation. How
do these people have so much time and dedication to keep making posts across
platforms attacking us? It’s relentless. Every day, dozens of new accounts join
our chat rooms to spread the same fabrications about GrapheneOS including via
direct messages. On Hacker News, one of the accounts making personal attacks
based on fabrications in most threads about GrapheneOS has been doing it for 8
years. Y Combinator has a financial stake in numerous surveillance and exploit
development companies. Hacker News is a platform they own and the moderators on
it have permitted years of vile harassment towards our team which they’d
normally remove if others were targeted. Hacker News mods micromanage it enough
to repeatedly ask us not to reuse a bit of text across our comments. Meanwhile,
they do nothing about disgusting personal attacks and harassment content
consistently being spread in threads about GrapheneOS on their heavily moderated
site. The largest privacy community on Reddit /r/privacy bans any discussion or
mentions of GrapheneOS. A bot automatically removes any post mentioning
GrapheneOS they’ll very actively ban people who evade their filters. The mods of
the subreddit misrepresent this as something we want. Many privacy subreddits
have mods who are hostile towards GrapheneOS. We were banned from posting on
/r/Android for multiple years. The mod who banned us said our official project
account on Reddit was ban evading because they once unjustifiably banned one of
our team members. On Wikipedia, a company attacking GrapheneOS project made
years of edits to the site pushing false narratives about us. They cited
articles based on their own press releases. Other content was made paraphrasing
Wikipedia which ended up being cited by it. It continues to this day. Articles
about GrapheneOS on most platforms often have comments engaging in baseless
personal attacks towards our team, linking to harassment content and making many
clearly inaccurate claims about it. We’ve found chat rooms coordinating this
including attacks on the X platform. Privacy projects are more vulnerable to
these attacks because the userbase and supporters largely avoid social media and
other platforms where it happens. Many people believe what they read on social
media if it isn’t countered and it builds echo chambers hostile to GrapheneOS.
Many people think these must be state sponsored attacks. However, our experience
is these attacks are primarily orchestrated by companies selling dubious
products marketed as private and secure. We did get targeted by state sponsored
smear campaigns in France and Spain though.


hacker news? what do you mean?
“On Hacker News, one of the accounts making personal attacks based on fabrications in most threads about GrapheneOS has been doing it for 8 years. Y Combinator has a financial stake in numerous surveillance and exploit”