People are calling on VPN providers to give temporary free service to Turkey during elections

I know ProtonVPN already has a free version, but I don’t know it’s limitations and if the servers of the free version can handle tens of thousands (maybe much more) new users all of a sudden. And if that’s not an issue it would be nice if ProtonVPN makes an announcement in Turkish, letting people know that it’s a safe and reliable service. (people are logically skeptical of free vpns)

Hopefully this is the last time we need to make this request. The election is tomorrow. Turkey’s biggest mobile phone operator, Turkcell, announced that their Istanbul offices will be closed all weekend and AKP has made some troubling statements about doing whatever it takes to stay in power. Internet access is cruicial in this elections, not just for access to news and social media but also to ensure election safety. I’ll be working as a volunteer for the voting safety organization Oy ve Ötesi and one of my duties is to take photos of all the documents filled in during the count and upload them onto an online system. It’s cruicial for people like me to be able to circumvent any sort of throttling or access block.

Thanks for your feedback.

There’s something about that here in Turkish:
https://twitter.com/ProtonVPN/status/1657068909910949909?s=20

And here, in English:
https://twitter.com/ProtonVPN/status/1657068547732799492?s=20

Elon Twitter: we hate censorship
Also Elon Twitter…

To all the lazy people questioning Proton, why it’s free and all that, do some effing research. Go to Proton’s site and read all the documentation and statements about its business model. The transparency is there.

This is mainly in response to the lazy naysayer types I saw in that Twitter thread. Do some damn homework or forever remain stupid with your hand out looking for the easy freebie, where everything is just handed to you. I pay for Proton and I trust Proton and its free option implicitly.

A lot of them already have free tiers so idk why they are requesting complete free access?

Ok so first of all I want to thank Proton for helping Turkey fight state censorship during this election. But also some of the comments are kind of heartbreaking. I was not asking for handouts, I know proton has a free version and my request was, pretty clearly, for Proton to provide information in Turkish. I asked because a lot of people who aren’t familliar with VPNs will be using them tomorrow, and not everyone can figure out which one is safe. Also I added the tweet just for additional context, and I’m sure the op of the tweet wasn’t talking about providers that have free versions like Proton.

But again, I appreciate that Proton is showing solidarity and this comment is about the commenters, not them.

Proton is already free at least the US,Netherlands and Japan for me.

I literally cannot search corn without it on turkey since tayip blocks every NSFW site.

Elon ‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Musk, ladies and gentlemen.

I think it makes sense why they offer a free tier. It’s one of the few providers that lets you try the service with zero obligation. With that said, I personally found the free version almost unusable. It was just really damn slow, which is understandable, I mean it’s free! I ended up upgrading to Unlimited.

okay? That’s why I asked for some of that information to be provided in a language people can understand so that they can use the service.

Proton’s free plan should be enough, given that it supports their Stealth protocol which tries to bypass censorship. However, it’s not guaranteed to work.

The paid tier has exponentially more servers and more features. The free tier is funded by the paid users.

I never really experienced any speed problems with the free tier.