You're free to say whatever messed up stuff you want to me, and I'm free to tell you to "Go F*CK Yourself"

I have yet to meet a free speech absolutist who was actually absolutist. At best they still struggle with violent speech and at worst they buy out a large social media platform and start censoring shit they don’t like.

There are other universal exceptions which I'm guessing you are forgetting:

  * Slander
  * Fraud
  * Treason (actual treason - e.g., passing info
    to the enemy in a war for survival)

Unfortunately, real life always has grey areas; no simple algorithm can address it.

characterized as left-wing, right-wing, populist, nationalist, and conservative

and:

Ideology: Populism, Swedish nationalism, Left-conservatism, Anti-corruption, Anti-establishment, Anti-immigration

Political position: Syncretic

So basically everyone can (dis)like it for some reason...

Like the issue of the grooming gangs in the UK

Europe has this absurdist political compass that calls any anti-immigration party "far-right", even when their official party platform is center-left or far-left in every single other respect (like Örebro's current platform of substantial expansions of social welfare program funding). Same is true in France, where you have a party with far-left socialist economics and anti-immigration sentiment that is bucketed as "far-right".

Thank you for naming the party donated to.

It's a shame that refusing to consort with fascists is conflated with "being political".

One of the reasons I left so called "civil" society is that for lack of a better phrasing I often found the tent to be too big.

So no misunderstanding, millionaires gotta have the poor white Swedes blame the poor brown Swedes. True intelligence requires analysis of the power relations. The Mullvad boss can do without my money, and possibly I can spare my empathy for the next immigrant that will be beaten, burned or sent back to a war-torn country or a climate-change disaster zone.

Organizations that support the right of free speech always have to come to grips with the reality that supporting the right of free speech necessarily involves supporting the right of others to say things that the organization and/or the individuals in the organization didagree with.

Tor isn't the first such organization to have to draw distinctions between the principles it espouses and the parties it encounters, nor will it be the last.

This type of statement is not an invalidation of one's own principles, it is simply bringing clarity and focus to them. Tor advocates for freedom of speech, not for everything that others use that freedom to say.

It's "free speech", not "full agreement".

> "We support free speech, unless it's speech we disagree with"

Notably, you are using quotes around something that is not a quote. Your interpretation of the text does not flow from the content of the text. Tor's stance is the bog-standard pro free-speech stance, as Hall wrote in characterization of Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".

Here's an actual quote from the text. This is the _second sentence_.

> We are not terminating the relationship but are setting clear boundaries on our relationship with Mullvad.

It is clear that you did not even read the text of the short post you are dismissing as "virtue signaling"!

Tor is actually still collaborating with Mullvad and they are no longer "co-branding". They are releasing a statement of their position, which is normal, necessary, and expected.

They clarify that Tor is a political project. Security and privacy are human rights goals which necessarily contend with the political context of surveillance and authoritarianism they exist in. The co-founders support of a far-right party, and the implicit support for surveillance that comes with it, are of significant and immediate concern to those who use Tor and Mullvad.

You can defend someone's right to say something while disagreeing with it, not supporting it, and not wanting to be associated with it. By publishing that blog post, Tor isn't attacking free speech; they are participating in it. As are you, when you respond to them, and I, when I respond to you.

> They decided it's more important to virtue signal

I'm always a bit confused by people using the term "virtue signaling". Do you never try to make ethical decisions in your life? If you do, why is it so hard to believe others are, too?

As it happens, Tor's aim is that they don't know who you are or what you say!

That isn't the standard. The OP addresses an unavoidable, fundamental paradox of freedom: Someone can use their freedom to limit the freedoms of others - if we support that person's freedom, are we supporting freedom or oppression? Are we free to oppress others?

The philosopher Karl Popper famously addressed this issue. Here are a couple more ways to think about it:

* Freedom as a social contract: I support your freedom and you support mine. If I support yours and you take away mine, you've violated the contract and it's void.

* In a society built on freedom, those who use their freedom to take away others' freedom are parasites on society.

Arguably, the only speech not to tolerate is intolerance.

But that's all philosophy. Practically, nobody believes any freedom is absolute. Freedom of speech is revered and in the first amendement in the US Constitution, but nobody thinks it's absolute: you can't slander people, defraud them, threaten them, create dangerous situations (famously, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater), etc.

Free speech advocates support the right of everyone to set up a stall in the marketplace of ideas, but don't have to support every idea that sets up a stall.

A publisher of gay erotica might support free speech, and find themselves alongside revolutionary communists, hitler-heiling nazis and radical islamists distributing bomb-making manuals - but the groups aren't allies or friends outside of that.

> the TOR mission was to allow spies to access the network and hide among all the other non-spy users

Tor is pretty clear about what their mission is, it's at the bottom of the Tor Project homepage https://www.torproject.org: "To advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, supporting their unrestricted availability and use, and furthering their scientific and popular understanding."

Claiming anything else is useless conspiracy thinking without evidence.

> It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory

The original idea came from the US Naval Research Laboratory, yes (as a way to mask the origin of messages to hide the command boat in a fleet), but the funding statement is patently false. In 2024, the majority of their government funding ($2.1M out of $2.5) came from the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, with the rest of the government money coming from even more innocuous sources. You can find this information on p41 of their IRS form: https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2023-2024-TheTorPro... also accessible from their Reports page at https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/

They also clarified that in this more readable post: https://forum.torproject.org/t/transparency-openness-and-our...

Certainly, you can speculate about the motivations of the U.S. State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and whether that's a front for more undercover objectives, but that front lines up pretty well with the US's (former?) foreign policy of undermining (unfriendly) dictatorial regimes, and Occam's Razor applies.

Ultimately though, the tools that Tor provides can absolutely be abused by bad actors, and ever since Silk Road, I've become convinced that the Tor network is overrun by a wretched hive of scum and villainy, where those morally defensible activities are utterly outnumbered by the criminal ones.

It's the best tool regular people have for privacy without a doubt.

>The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.

Just false.

If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.

If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.

Both things can be true... the original need for the network necessitated the mission of the foundation itself... you can't have a global network that only spies use, or you're not blending in, so you have to make it about a public good that many civilians will also use.

Other systems like I2P, SimpleX, Tribler, Datura etc. take additional steps to mitigate such kinds of Sybil attacks that people talk about against Tor, and new methods are being worked on all the time.

Splitting up your traffic across multiple nodes/circuits/etc. as well as persistent dummy/decoy traffic are some methods I've seen discussed recently.

> if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time

IMO This is a colossal "if" and not something we can realistically determine besides saying "we know it happens sometimes, but certainly not all or even most of the time."

Everyone's threat model is different, and hiding from state-level actors is generally 1. much too complicated to succeed at, and 2. you're probably not that special in the first place that you'd actually be targeted. The privacy community is bursting at the seams with all manner of tinfoil-hat wearers and wild conspiracy theorists that think some dark boogeyman is out to get them.

I'd also like to see a source that proves "most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra."