cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/45061709
There 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.
isn’t that y they have the drama in the first place? sUpPoRt MoRe DeViCeS. yeah that gonna happen w Moto cuz Moto actually gives a fuck, unlike the rest.
Not at all, the drama comes from stuff like a few months ago when one French reporter interviewed one French police officer who complained about not being able to crack GrapheneOS and they decided to scream they were being persecuted by the French government, and while doing that casually suggesting two other French Android distros were involved in this “government persecution” and they could have backdoored their systems for the government, and then going back to the routine of screaming to the world that they are the ones being slandered by other projects and blah blah blah
They also seem to have no comprehension of Threat Model and constantly call other distros fake/phoney, “dubious” privacy OS. If GrapheneOS was a Linux distro they would be saying Arch is not really secure because they don’t compartmentalize and sandbox every application and blah blah blah, none of the drama comes from GrapheneOS technical aspects, it’s all from their toxic community.
I’m pretty sure that if they saw my four comments here, they would dub me as “dozen people spending at least several hours attacking GrapheneOS across platforms on a daily basis” as well, “orchestrated by companies selling dubious products marketed as private and secure”.