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.
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.
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
Title is incorrect, it’s not Mullvad donating the money but one of the owners.
Keep giving corporations your money, what could possibly go wrong.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Why not just cut out the middle man and join an ethno nationalist party?
You don’t have free speech when you’re made illegal, which is what far right parties like this one are doing to immigrants
Consumers are nothing but fish in a barrel these days
This is why I don’t like any people and none of their parties.
Years of uncompromised world class service. Then a person there has the audacity of having a political view (shocking!)
Now they suck and should be boycotted. This is how ingrate you look, we were lucky we even had mullvad in the first place.
You make me sick you Hitlerite apologist.
Not even wikipedia says what fucking side is on and I’m somehow… whatever I’m going to leave you and your shitty opinions.
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.
Guess where part of your money is going to…
If you buy most products, chances are some portion of it is going to a Nazi sympathizer.
So is the nazi coowner getting ousted soon?
Right now we’re at “Mullvad is part nazi, nazi adjacent, nazi lite, moderately fascist, feudalism-curious” stage.
A dinner table with one Nazi amongst five friends just makes a table of five Nazi.
True but with enough backlash, he might be convinced to leave.
Hopefully he leaves, not sure if that is possible/likely though
Right now we are at some people are genuine, some people are in denial, some people are apathetic, some people are clearly very right wing, and some people are deliberately posting clickbait and manipulative rubbish.
chill. I’m definitely taking your word for it /s. If everything I don’t agree with is fascism, well that makes it easy huh?
Yeah, we get it, you love Nazis.
Be CEO of privacy company
Donate $500k to a right wing party publicly
Mullvad
Reverse credit card charge
Yeah… About that…
You mailed in cash didn’t you
In the past they let you keep CC on file for monthly payments but now they’re prepay only and they delete CC info after 40 days. I think I prepaid for like a year and half before I knew any of this. Mullvad’s obsession with user privacy is completely unparalleled in 2026.
Kinda their best feature
I use sometimes only an Proxy to skip country restrictions, I don’t use a VPN. If I need an VPN, I would probably use the SPN from the Portmaster which I use anyway.
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.
Well there’s one thing I do know: I sure as hell wouldn’t trust that VPN operator
You know, during the backlash against Musk and Tesla, I was wondering how many nazis there were in the board or among the executives of other car makers, and how many among the shareholders.
What I’m getting to is there is no less reason now to trust Mullvad than before, and no less reason to trust more other VPN providers, just because you have no idea who their CEO/founders/owners are.
So you did research, found nothing, and are still siding with Nazis?
because one of their ceo’s is right wing trash?
how far would you push that then, there are other things he is a part of, a gender, a race, a country, a species…
Here’s the fix for you: “Giving your money to Mullvad is like drinking at a Nazi bar. The bar’s great, but it’s full of Nazis”.
Sounds more l ike the owner of the bar is a nazi than the bar being filled with nazis
Yeah, but his donation was something like 72% of the donations to that party by money given. That’s not just a donation; that’s him funding his own private far-right party. And if he wants his own far-right party, it’s probably not just for looks.
This guy co-owns Mullvad. That all Mullvad is doing about it is wringing their hands and saying ‘oh, but it’s his money, there’s nothing we can do’ is, quite frankly, disgusting. It’s his money that he got from your company, in large enough quantities he can go out and buy himself some racists like Phil Knight buying himself a fucking basketball team.
If a lower-level employee makes some shit-ass racist comment on their own time, they tend to get canned immediately. Yet all this asshole gets is Mullvad shaking their heads and saying ‘well, it doesn’t align with our values, but what you gonna do?’ Bullshit.
Well, if he’s the co-founder and the co-owner, the only thing “they” (I assume the 2nd owner/founder) can really do is try to convince him to leave.
What else would you expect? That he shutdowns the company, drop their customers and fire their employees, then restart the same company with a different name without that individual?
That would be a guaranteed lawsuit, and could actually break even more trust form all parties.Or just sells his shares and leaves, alone, so that Mullvad goes from “one co-owner funds a far-right nazi party” to “Mullvad now fully own by a nazi-fanboy”? (again: abandoning employees and customers to the good will of that charming individual).
You are correct, but what exactly is the company meant to do about this? What can they actually do?
I really would have liked a much stronger statement from the other CEO, but he is also in damage control and is responsible for the survival of the company, and continued employment of its staff.
“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.
He may have other income streams, but it would be dishonest to suggest that mullvad customer money did not end up in the pockets of an absurd political party. I do have to wonder how many of the people ramping up about this also boycott the plethora of evil corporations, as well as the evil countries/governments.
As I wrote above: the “good” companies might actually be just led by nazis who are better at hiding their personal beliefs and donations…
Guaranteed.
there are political parties here in Australia with names like:|
- refugees are welcome here
- muslim votes matter
- save the environment
- free palestine
- companions and pets party
who solely exist to funnel preferential votes to right wing/racist political parties.
Humans are often trash, by choice.
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.
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?
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.
This is just one step, though. Money to Mullvad goes in part to the cofounder who is a racist piece of shit.
But to your question, I think the “dilution” question has a different answer for everyone. Have you seen “The Good Place”? Philosophy is the major theme and this is one of the major philosophical questions they deal with. Great show, recommended if it’s unfamiliar to you.
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.
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
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?
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.
They won’t get rid of him if there is no threat of bankruptcy… “Lets not jump into action maybe they’ll do the right thing” is not a good plan
They can force him out as CEO, that can do nothing about his co-ownership though.
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??
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).
lol. As if fucking Kape should even be a part of the conversation. Evil scum.
It is a very dodgy industry, that is not restricted to kape, although they are definitely a major part of it.
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.
From what I have read, there is nothing remotely ‘left’ about them, aside from people labelling them as left.
Duopolies generally have 1 party labelled as left, 1 as right, but they are both always right, and their aim is to keep the government/country right wing. Labelling 1 party as left offers the illusion of choice to zombie voters.
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.
Even bigger yikes.
Use librewolf browser
Do they have a VPN?
Your headline is misleading.
One of the founders (and co-ceo) of Mullvad made a substantial donation to an unhinged political party. Mullvad did not, and Mullvad claim to be against it.
This has been all over mastodon for days.
But I need to be angry against something and isolate myself in a corner on society where everything is evil but me!
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.
I meant lemmy, I have only just started using both with the aim of dropping reddit and bluesky, and apparently I am confused.
I agree the post should be removed.
Mullvad has not claimed to be against it. Mullvad has pretty much said “if you don’t like free speach, we’re sorry you feel that way”.
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.
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”.They don’t plainly say against it no, but they’re still clearly distancing themselves from it. It’s not as good as outright denouncing it, but much better than staying silent.
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.
“It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission.”
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
Nothing is obvious for multiple reasons, one of them is that people are deliberately trying to manipulate this to be ‘Mullvad is the nazi party’
The headline of the thread we are commenting on is pure trash.
I requested and received my refund, I hope many others are doing the same with the aim of pressuring his removal from the company
The headline isn’t trash, it’s accurate. If Mullvad didn’t exist, the majority of the party’s funding wouldn’t exist.
You’re moving the goalposts. Claiming to be against it and saying they had nothing to do with it aren’t the same thing.
Their response quoted here was too subtle, but you know it is pr for a very serious issue for the company.
“not part of Mullvad’s values” ,perhaps we interpret this differently because we are different people. If something is not part of my values, I am against it, because I am value based, how I interact with society is completely defined by my values.
For all I know you are corn chip based, maybe even a corn chip cooked in palm oil, using child labour, purchased from amazon, and delivered by ubereats.
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.
Using the word “fact” doesn’t make something a fact, do you find people usually fall for that obvious bs?
People are deliberately trying to mislead other people with click bait headlines. Discredit the company by making it look like he is the company. Many people do not read past headlines, many people just follow the crowd, and are eagerly manipulated by it.
If he was the only owner, then yes his company would very more than likely be very much in line with his own morals, or lack of.
But he isn’t the only owner, he isn’t the company.
Decent customers should be getting refunds to apply pressure to the dodgy co-CEO in the hope that he does the right thing and leaves mullvad, or is somehow removed, or so that the (as far as we aware ) decent CEO makes his own vpn company with the morals that we believe(d) mullvad to have.
The irony of clearly dodgy people deliberately trying to make this a ‘mullvad is evil’ thing, is pathetic, but not surprising.
Mullvad issued a response. Which IMO is shitty.
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.
