A co-founder of a VPN company gave a lot of money to a far-right party. That part is true, and I want to say so plainly before I say anything else, because the rest of this is about how a true thing gets turned into a product.
The facts, briefly and fairly. Daniel Berntsson, co-founder and co-owner of Mullvad, personally donated five million kronor — roughly €450,000 — to Örebropartiet, a Swedish party whose platform is "re-emigration" and whose leader calls the people he wants gone "parasites." That donation was about 72% of everything the party raised in 2025, the largest private gift to any Swedish party that year. Berntsson confirmed it himself, by email. It's not a leak, a rumor, or a smear.
The reporting is clean, too. It broke in Flamman — Sweden's oldest socialist newspaper, founded 1906, editorially independent — which didn't run on a single source. They had the party's own income filing, an interview with Mullvad, and a named researcher from the Expo foundation. Mullvad's other co-founder distanced the company and offered refunds. A conference dropped their sponsorship. That's how a real story is supposed to move: a public record, cross-checked, answered on the record.
So I'm not here to relitigate the donation. Everyone with a keyboard already did. I came for something else. I wanted to watch what happened to the domain after the story broke — because a brand name in the middle of an outrage cycle is not a reputation anymore. It's a resource. And there's an industry that mines resources like that.
I pulled Mullvad's backlink profile. Here is the first lie the numbers tell you.
The tools will say mullvad.net has 912,115 backlinks. Impressive. Also meaningless. Because the top three referring domains alone account for about 500,000 of them — more than half the entire profile: serwerownia.ovh (237,197), monero.fail (175,763), and ipv4.gg (86,838). None of those is 237,000 people deciding to link to a VPN. It's one templated link on each site, exploded across infinite auto-generated URLs — session IDs, junk query strings, parameter permutations stacked twenty deep. One link, counted a quarter-million times.
The honest number isn't 912,000. It's 13,390 referring domains. Anyone quoting the big one is either fooled or selling you something. Usually selling.
Which brings me to the part that actually made me sit up.
Filter the anchor text — the visible words people hyperlink — and about twenty thousand backlinks to Mullvad carry the same phrase. Not "Mullvad," not "VPN," not any human sentence. They say: TELEGRAM @SEO_ANOMALY — SEO BACKLINKS, PBN, BLACK-LINKS, TRAFFIC BOOST, LINK INDEXING.
That's an advertisement. It's a link-spam vendor advertising a black-hat service, in the anchor text, on twenty thousand links, across roughly 150 throwaway domains — things like seo-anomaly-d-1.xyz and seo-anomaly-beijing.online, auto-spawning pages named finland_proxy_vpn_vps_hosting-01-06-2026, japan_proxy_vpn_vps_hosting, country after country. Dated June 2026. Fresh. Live while the story was hot.
Mullvad didn't build that. This is the important thing to understand and the reason a lazy hit piece would be wrong: those links are inbound. A spam operator points high-authority brand names at its own garbage pages so search engines will crawl and index the garbage — the borrowed credibility of a famous domain, used as a ladder. Mullvad is the ladder, not the climber. They run no affiliate program and no link operation at all, which in this industry is almost eccentric.
But watch the timing, because the timing is the tell. A brand spends a week at the top of every feed. Its name becomes a high-traffic search term. And the machinery that farms high-traffic search terms — the PBNs, the indexers, the anchor-spam vendors — moves toward it like tide. Outrage doesn't just cost a company customers. It manufactures raw material, and the material gets mined by people who don't care what the story was.
Then there's the legal layer of the same instinct — the part that's technically above board and somehow worse.
Mullvad has no affiliate program. Almost every competitor does. Affiliate VPNs live and die on "best VPN 2026" and "Mullvad alternatives" pages that pay a commission on every signup. So when the one major no-affiliate provider takes a reputational hit, the entire affiliate ecosystem has exactly one incentive, pointing exactly one way: amplify it, and route the switching traffic somewhere that pays. Within days the comparison farms had their "Mullvad controversy explained — here's what to switch to" pages up. A direct competitor issued a jokey press release about its own CEO donating to a dog rescue. Reach, harvested. Nobody in that chain was lying, exactly. They were just standing downstream of someone else's bad week with a bucket.
I recognize all of it, which is the only reason I can describe it this precisely. I spent a decade building the commercial version of this exact machine — the international link structures, the intent capture, the art of standing your page in front of someone at the moment they're ready to click. I was good at it. I am not writing this from above the thing. I'm writing it from inside, with the lights on.
So here's what I actually want you to take, because it's worth more than another opinion about a Swedish donation.
A story and its exhaust are two different objects. The story here was small, true, and already fully told by people who did the work — a filing, a newspaper, a man confirming his own signature. Everything after that was exhaust: the inflated backlink counts, the anchor-spam vendors riding the name, the affiliate farms converting anger into commission, the competitor mugging for the camera. None of it added a single fact. All of it fed on the ones that were already there.
You can learn to tell them apart. The story points at a primary source — a document, a record, a person on the record. The exhaust points at you — at your click, your switch, your outrage, your subscription. When something arrives dressed as news and every link in it is trying to sell you the alternative, you're not reading the story. You're standing in the exhaust.
The donation was real. So was the far right it funded. But the loudest machinery that assembled around it wasn't there to tell you that. It was there because your attention had briefly become ore, and there is always someone with a shovel.