Hey there Shorty Judges! This is Irina, Proton’s Head of Social & Community, writing this entry primarily to give my amazing team the recognition they deserve for their outstanding brand work on social media.
Historically, Proton Drive did not pop on social media, so in 2025 we set out to give Proton Drive, the privacy-first cloud storage service from Proton, a voice as bold as its mission. Our goal was to stop sounding like “yet another secure storage tool” and instead become the outspoken friend in your group chat who calls out Big Tech and still sends you useful links.
Specifically, we aimed to:
Underpinning all of this was a simple creative idea: if everyone else’s cloud account talks like a press release, Proton Drive would be the cloud that talks back. Sharp, funny, and unafraid to not sound like a corporate account.
We began by rewriting Proton Drive’s playbook from “product channel” to “main-character energy.” The team defined a few non-negotiables for the new voice: never talk down to people, never hide the stakes of privacy, and never miss an opportunity to be a little unhinged when Big Tech deserved it.
We built content pillars that mapped to that personality:
The clearest expression of this voice was our “otherwise” mini-saga. When Google promoted its cloud as private and “encrypted,” we quote-tweeted with:
“Google wants you to use their cloud storage to keep your files ‘secure’ and ‘encrypted’. Our pinned tweet says otherwise.”
The pinned post itself was a prank, being in fact a one-word post. Just “otherwise.”
We noticed the momentum and doubled down with a third tweet (“If our pinned tweet is confusing, our bio tells you what to do instead”) that extended the bit into our profile bio. Other accounts began copying the “our pinned tweet says otherwise” format, turning a niche privacy dunk into a mini trend.
The new voice transformed Proton Drive’s presence on X in 2025.
From January 1 to December 31, 2025 @ProtonDrive X:
The “otherwise” mini-saga alone delivered 8M impressions and 724K engagements and 5k new followers at a combined engagement rate of ~10%.
Our dunk and hijack content proved that having a point of view pays off: posts tagged as “Dunk” represented around 62% of total impressions and nearly 70% of engagements, while accounting for fewer than 1 in 5 posts. Meme-driven content added another ~1.5M impressions and 145K engagements. Besides receiving consistent praise from our followers, our content has also been shared by supporters on other channels such as Reddit.
Most importantly, privacy advocates and everyday users began quoting and screenshotting Proton Drive’s posts as “the way brands should talk about data.”
