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
Whoever operates the main GrapheneOS account is paranoid. Everybody’s out to get them. I’ve had a bad impression of GrapheneOS from the first day I read their posts. It was like it written by some person scared of the wind.
The then went on to bombard a privacy advocate who reviewed GrapheneOS whose review was largely positive except for a few things. Then Louis Rossman left a comment “oh that’s concerning” and was the following target of the account’s ire. The dude from EOS has also been the target of that account for a long time.
If they could just replace their social media team and try to be respectful netizens, GrapheneOS would seem like a safe option. But it feels like nobody this account has a vendetta against would be safe to use GrapheneOS. With somebody is as paranoid as that, it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried anything in their power to hurt “their enemies”.
This is frustratingly half-true.
Reddit mods on r/privacy banned discussion of GrapheneOS due to some drama that was pretty much all due to one GrapheneOS developer tilting at windmills. (In these Mastodon posts, it looks like that developer might be back at it again. Here’s an example of what I’m referring to.)
The Reddit ban was an acceptable policy…
For maybe a week.
It’s been years since then, and they still unjustly ban discussion about it.The Reddit privacy community used to be okay, but it is now under de facto control of a powermod and close affiliate to the admins, IKIR115.
They have time because they are paid.