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.

I for one am very happy with all that your team does. Have been running GrapheneOS on my phone for well over 3 years now and I am never going back. Keep up the good work!

GrapheneOS is a fantastic OS. I would always recommend. Haters gonna hate. But yea. When these shit storms are organized that's a bit of a mess. Sorry guys you're doing a great job.

Purism (maker of PureOS) also appears to face a similar issue where there are always users lurking around, available to smear anything and everything about it. It's stupid, because like fake 5-star reviews, or 1-star ones, this is noticeable too. It only takes a slight suspicion and a quick glance.

Purism's products have atrocious security and don't provide what they claim. Purism spread an enormous amount of misinformation about their own products and others to promote themselves. They've indirectly caused a lot of harm to GrapheneOS despite them usually refraining from direct attacks on it.

There are several cases where Purism's community manager or someone else with access to their accounts made attacks on the GrapheneOS project including personal attacks on our team. They aren't one of the main groups attacking us but they're not allies and this thread does apply to them a bit too.

Purism is focused on giving full ownership to the user. They're killin' it on privacy, given the level of comfort and control the hardware provides. Y'all are mostly focused on the OS. They have to do hardware, too. So what they've done up to this point is ape sh** crazy for their size. No?

No, Purism is focused on profiting from scamming people with products which in reality have atrocious security. They falsely claim closed source hardware and firmware is open source too. They've taken away attention and substantial resources from actual open hardware, privacy and security projects.

Purism's hardware is the direct opposite of what we want. It's bottom of the barrel, low end hardware at extremely high prices. It has atrocious security throughout the hardware, firmware and software. They've chosen components based on gaming a nonsensical standard which directly harms security.

I think you shouldn't care at all, as long as Graphene keeps its current stance. Let the OS speak for itself. ;) At the end it wouldn't matter

Elon's discovered meth

Is there any serious pressing legitimate concerns? I know these are all horrible, but I mean something that is or may affect your ability to ship out? I assume not based on the Motorola deal, but I was curious if any legislation, lobbyists, and / or credible hackers are doing any damage or not