That anonymously submitted medium article that gets floated around ignores Internet Association, so wouldn’t be shocking if it was from proton attempting to do PR damage fixating on identity politics with intentional omission of Internet Association involvement.
Yen conveniently ignored that after working at the FTC, Slater become the vice-president for legal and regulatory policy for the Internet Association lobby group. Which was founded by “small business” like Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook.
And involved in trying to infringe upon privacy rights. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/lawmakers-must-not-let-internet-association-weaken-california-consumer-privacy-act
So yeah, proton founder cherry picked information that tried to make it seem like it was acceptable to praise the pick when reality her past is too murky to endorse.
Apple Tim Cook showed that ideology doesn't matter when monetary greed is involved, so falling to look how not intolerant Yen just comes off as a diversion from the criticism regarding him choosing to praise Slater by omitting details of her history that didn't fit the pro consumer narrative for the little guy.
That sounds like the typical libertarian excuse used when they aren't amongst fellow conservatives but trying to come off as not on the side being criticized.
Better defense would be saying yeah Andy may or may not want to be part of the inner circle like Tim Cook who is bending the knee to Trump for more money even though people know he isn't racist or against lgbtq. And sure he chose to ignore that Slater worked for the Internet Association maybe hoped people wouldn't dig further and chose to portray Republicans as being more the party of the little guy, because he may or may not have wanted to be part of the new tech inner circle with Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos by publicly signaling praise.
But, the company itself is not in the US so hopefully that keeps things from getting worse even though the company chose to double down making the statement again from Protons official account so it became not just a Yen statement but a Proton one before deleting everything when response wasn't what they hoped of people joining in on the praise. So maybe they learned their lesson and will go back to focusing on proton products as opposed to political endorsements.
https://archive.ph/quYyb
Basically more than 75% of that anonymous totally not Andy Yen article is nothing but fluff going look how not racist and homophobic he is when that stuff does not matter in the least bit when billions are potentially involved as best demonstrated by Tim Cook. That article is like the golden example of identity politics with how it brings it up to shift attention away from Slater endorsement despite her history with the Internet Association infringing among privacy of consumers and Republican whitewashing as the party of the little people.