GrapheneOS Echo chambers, sensational creators, ungrounded LLMs, human imagination, and a paranoia created by a lack of safety and knowing how safe is enough.
Sometimes human thinking gets wild, they see Windows exploited by NSA and patched only when disclosed and say Windows has backdoors, then people see criminals arrested who use GrapheneOS and say GrapheneOS is cracked. But for a sane person, cryptographically, cracking a strong pseudorandom password is currently unviable even if a quantum computer arrives and halves the search space for AES-256.
Most of us have never gotten arrested and therefore mostly do not know what tactics the police may employ, persuasion or violence, to compel the defendants to unlock their phones. Even from the "ARGs" that spam accounts created for us, the words in the document they gave were just "extracted" or similar (which Cellebrite also uses for consensual FFS extraction), not "cracked" or so. Those purported documents are not real because regardless of the nature of the crime, a court cannot write a document with the use of such juvenile language and base its information on ungrounded claims related to technology. Remember they were the ones deep diving into monopolies like Google and Apple, all tech giants. They are not uneducated, angsty teens who need to prove a point against GrapheneOS.
Sometimes new or prospective privacy seekers who are not well-versed in technology and computing subscribe to so-called privacy channels. Because independent (i.e. low subscriber count or operated by one person) creators are often less sanitized, they tend to be more radical in viewpoints, and YouTube algorithm loves doomsday scenarios they draw up. The result is YouTube steals their attention and also their sanity, the content keeps becoming more extreme. LLMs and AI voice dubbing has also made this easier, and while Google made it harder for GrapheneOS users to make an account anonymously, those anonymous creators are actively flooding the community with misinformation with unclear motives.
Some people are naturally contrarian. We know that whether it is game, hardware, there will always be insider leakers then there are speculators. For example, currently, we objectively know that Nvidia makes more performant gaming GPUs than AMD, and what happens when a person's favorite is the underdog? Leaks that say "X will focus on mid-range sector" will naturally be less appealing than "LEAK: X next generation Y chip KILLS Z?" The same for GrapheneOS. There is not much to advance in security because it is a passive, incremental defense game, but attacks are forever things and "GOS users are DOOMED? Police caught GOS users" catches attention far better, then to hook the viewers they begin making escalating unhinged claims about the state of society, they make up a narrative that sounds so well integrated beginners lose track of what is reality and what is a manipulation tactic.
Then we know people who have never heard of privacy before, any person in general always have a positive bias for whatever they see first. Maybe they see some misinformation campaign painting GrapheneOS developers are unbearable or biased and believe GrapheneOS is just a con art without the overwhelming amount of evidence pointing towards the other way and the facts that whatever alternative they support do not even sound rational.
Also I noticed many posts here lately seem to mirror what is being asked on the "r/GrapheneOS", with a few hours of delay before getting on here. Which makes me wonder, people who would die for Nitter and Invidious/PureTube still view Reddit instead of the community's native platform as the source of truth and diverse viewpoints, or is this forum suffering from a bot problem?
At least our community is generally strong because those who use GrapheneOS can see the forest for the trees and not sway in the face of mounting misinformation campaigns.