Hey there Shorty Judges! This is Irina, Proton’s Head of Social & Community, writing this entry to give my amazing team the recognition they deserve and to celebrate our outstanding results on X in 2025.
Proton VPN operates in a crowded VPN market where most brands sound interchangeable: generic “online safety” copy, stock photos of hoodies, and risk-free platitudes. In 2025, our goal was to build a brand voice on X that felt as strong as Proton VPN’s real-world impact on internet freedom.
We set out to differentiate Proton VPN on X by creating a voice that:
- Speaks plainly about censorship and is not afraid of naming names when necessary.
- Balances “gangster” energy and humour with a values-driven commitment to human rights.
- Earns trust from privacy-conscious power users while being approachable and meme-friendly for mainstream audiences.
On X, our primary stage, this meant showing up as a real person with a spine: calling out shady behavior, reacting in real time to internet shutdowns flagged by the Proton VPN Observatory, and making our community feel like they’re in the fight with us, not just watching a brand perform it.
Ultimately, success meant not just higher engagement, but users publicly saying, “Proton is one of my favorite companies,” “damn Proton take my follow,” and “after this reply I’m upgrading and moving my email to you as well.”
To build a distinct brand voice on X, we started from three simple rules:
- Never hedge on values.
If something threatens privacy or free access to information, we say it clearly.
- Humour with receipts.
We use memes, dunks, and banter but always grounded in facts, links, and screenshots.
- Human first, brand second.
No “we at Company X”; just a sharp, opinionated human voice that replies, quotes, and debates in real time.
We operationalized this voice around core content pillars:
- Censorship watchdog.
When the Proton VPN Observatory spots shutdowns or blocks, we turn that into plain-language threads—often in local languages. For example, posts on the UK Online Safety Act and Pornhub blocking France combined real-time product data (“signups from the UK surged by 1,400%,” “registrations from France increased 1,000%”) with context about why people are fleeing to privacy tools.
- Big Tech accountability & dunks.
We highlight absurd platform behavior (like a Chrome “VPN” extension that screenshots every site you visit, or Discord’s age-verification issues) using quote tweets, receipts, and punchy one-liners when Big Tech acts clueless.
- Educational threads & features with personality.
We turn dry security topics into scroll-stoppers: USB “juice jacking” explained like a heist movie, new features like Connect-and-Go framed for people who “hate wasting even a nanosecond,” and VPN basics broken down without fear-mongering.
- Conversation, not broadcast.
75% of our 1,071 posts in 2025 were replies. We spend most of our time in the mentions: engaging in trending conversations and amplifying smart community takes.
The main challenge was walking the line between being fearless and being reckless. We coordinated closely with legal, PR, and product to ensure our call-outs were accurate and defensible, and we created internal guardrails: punch up, never down; receipts over insinuations; no jokes about vulnerable groups.
From January 1 to December 31, 2025 @ProtonMail X:
- Generated 24M impressions (+104% YoY) and 1,1M engagements (+101% YoY) across 522 posts (+286% YoY)
- Followers grew by 21k net to 196k (up 61% YoY), and engagement rate remained stable at 4.7%.
Most importantly, our voice changed how people talk about us:
- Users publicly described Proton as “gangster,” “based,” and “one of my favorite companies.”
- Several replies explicitly tied our stance to revenue (“I was thinking about cancelling my Proton VPN sub—after this reply I’m upgrading and moving my email to you,” “I used your free VPN, now I’m going to buy the paid tier”).
- Others highlighted our integrity: “The Proton team operates with spine,” “This interaction is exactly why I use Proton Mail/Proton VPN.”
One particular tweet stood out last year: Our banter with the Perplexity’s CEO who criticized us for sharing a TechCrunch interview where he announced ads. This became a full-blown brand-to-CEO moment, later amplified by the main Proton account, and flooded with replies calling Proton “based,” “gangster,” and “one of my favorite companies.”
