Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 397 posts

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#131

Post by jariel »

gonehome wrote: post #48
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can choose not to abide by local laws and likely be shutdown entirely. That way you’ll have effectively zero ability to influence local legislation / promote the interests of users. Do you mean to imply you believe this would be a more optimal approach to the problem? There’s perfect, and then there’s the dirty, mean, savage, brutal, beautiful world. Edit to add: > The company said it would no longer block accoun…

People use this to rationalize continued involvement (often when it also happens to be profitable). People can basically rationalize any bad behavior - it really seems like a skill that has no limits up to and including genocide. In practice, I think the negative impact of helping to enable censorship for an authoritarian country outweighs whatever (likely zero) influence you’d believe you’d have. Sometimes to be on…

"Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away."

This is not a Google-like situation - for Zoom 'walking way' effectively means shutting down. They are very heavily Chinese based.

In the longer term, they could move operations, in which case the choice would be 'walk away from China' - but right now, it's more existential than that.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#132

Post by alisonatwork »

joyfulmantis wrote: post #70
dannyw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s an excuse at all. As an American, it’s fully within my rights to critique the CCP to as many mainlanders I want to, including holding meetings with mainlanders. They should have been never blocked.

As an american you don't have the right while in mainland china to criticize the CCP. While there is no simple way to apply sovereignty to the internet, the decision to follow the laws of the participants countries seems relatively reasonable.

The interesting thing about this is that it's asymmetric.

If you are a Chinese citizen you can be arrested for sharing content the Party objects to, even if you were overseas when you did it[1]. You do not even have to be inside China or a Chinese citizen, the authorities may still kidnap and imprison you for exercising your right to free speech in jurisdictions where it is not restricted[2]. So it seems like it doesn't really matter to the Chinese government what the laws are in other countries, when it comes to suppressing speech.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials and propaganda outlets continue to enjoy full freedom of speech in both social media and traditional media in the west.

[1] https://www.axios.com/china-arrests-university-minnesota-twi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#133

Post by chrismcb »

HALtheWise wrote: post #36
monocasa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, as absolutely reprehensible Apple's similar actions are, Zoom canceled _a US based account_ because of a Chinese request. It's one thing to be all "we comply with local laws", and another to enforce one country's geopolitical aspirations across international borders. Like, I think companies should take a stand and both aren't acceptable, but Zoom takes new, additional steps here.

Most US companies that I am familiar with apply US laws to all their users, at least to some extent. For example, I don't think that YouTube will allow you to post a blatantly copyright-infringing video, even if your account declares a country that doesn't enforce US copyright laws. Similarly, I suspect that Facebook would take down a page for a terrorist group, without needing permission from the country they are ba…

There are like three small companies that aren't signatories of the Berne convention. So YouTube is probably don't the right thing in regards to copyright ( with the exception of possibly some differences on what is public domain) While your point about following us laws are valid, copyright was a poor example. But there is also the issue that most us companies are actually us companies and still need to follow us laws.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#134

Post by baybal2 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #128
baybal2 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies that work to suppress the rights of citizens are complicit in that suppression and its legality is irrelevant. 100% true. American corporations, and businessmen who collaborated with NSDAP in jew gassing "because it was the law," well, just did what they did. It made them genocide collaborators, and criminals regardless if they did it under the law, or not. As ancient Romans were saying "a crime can be a…

> A word crime in a sense as a fault, as something objectively morally reprehensible itself If you want to appeal to a “crime” beyond what people decide is wrong, you are starting to smuggle in an objective moral standard. I think that is hard without appealing to a God or gods.

> I think that is hard without appealing to a God or gods.

You know, people used to do so.

Even without that, the loss of objective examination of a fault as a key discerning factor for a justice system was to the detriment of justice.

This leads to a situation when even supreme court judges of countries are being confused by hundreds of contradictory laws of modern legal systems, and can not simply say what is the overall meaning of the law on a given subject without spending hours on research, and writing a lengthy opinion.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#135

Post by chrismcb »

joyfulmantis wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not necessarily saying that US and Chinese laws are equivalent in this sense, but it does seem like something of a double standard. And that’s perfectly fine.

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

If they don't operate in those other countries, then yeah, they should feel free to ignore the laws of that country. If they operate there, it is a different story.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#136

Post by chrismcb »

baybal2 wrote: post #97
monocasa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, as absolutely reprehensible Apple's similar actions are, Zoom canceled _a US based account_ because of a Chinese request. It's one thing to be all "we comply with local laws", and another to enforce one country's geopolitical aspirations across international borders. Like, I think companies should take a stand and both aren't acceptable, but Zoom takes new, additional steps here.

> Companies that work to suppress the rights of citizens are complicit in that suppression and its legality is irrelevant. 100% true. American corporations, and businessmen who collaborated with NSDAP in jew gassing "because it was the law," well, just did what they did. It made them genocide collaborators, and criminals regardless if they did it under the law, or not. As ancient Romans were saying "a crime can be a…

Morality and crime aren't the same thing. So yes, a crime can be made more or less criminal under a law. That is by definition.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#137

Post by koheripbal »

throwaway0613 wrote: post #118

Bear in mind that Zoom is a Chinese company — the founding team is Chinese; the core engineering and ops teams are largely in Suzhou and Hangzhou. So, while they are incorporated in the US and have significant presence in their HQ, their ties to China are stronger than the more-commonly-discussed outsourced-engineering sort of relationship.

We are rapidly devolving into separate internets.

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#138

Post by pnako »

unishark wrote: post #112
pnako wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which country would that be? Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc. Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

> And which country would that be? With your apparent standard for freedom of speech, isn't pretty much every country excluded? So now everyone is the same as an authoritarian one-party state that outlaws opposition parties and actively censors all internet websites.

I didn't say it was exactly the same, but it's not terribly different either.

Many conservatives or "alt right" types get censored in the west, and some of them have to find hosting in Russia (or on Russian social networks like VK), a country we condemn for censorship. I'm not under the delusion that Russia hosts those people out of respect for freedom of speech, of course, but I find it an interesting observation.

It's hard to blame China for censoring people it deems terrorists, separatists, enemies of the state or whatever, when in the west we're so quick to do it with the enemy-du-jour, sticking a label like 'Nazi' to demonize them (currently, it's the far right/alt right, previously it was communists, who knows which group it will be in ten years).

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#139

Post by pnako »

komali2 wrote: post #103
pnako wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which country would that be? Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc. Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

It's no cop out - businesses don't hold a monopoly on violence. They can't summarily remove the right of travel and speech (by jailing someone). A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.

[flagged]

Re: Zoom Acknowledges It Suspended Activists' Accounts at China's Request

#140

Post by koheripbal »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #32
yingw787 wrote: post #25

I'm not sure I agree with Zoom's strategy here. Adtech can get away with compromising user's privacy because users aren't customers, they're eyeballs for advertisers. Zoom by contrast does primarily B2B sales, and calls do need to have some semblance of privacy. If a Western-based multinational corporation competes with a China-based company, Zoom suddenly looks a lot scarier. People sometimes say nothing came of the…

> When the NSA mentioned connections between datacenters were tapped, I believe FAANG immediately end-to-end encrypted links between datacenters... This is correct, at least for Google. I worked at Google when the Snowden leaks happened and there was an immediate company-wide push to encrypt all server-to-server traffic.

... but wouldn't all DC to DC traffic be over an encrypted site-to-site VPN anyway?
Post reply on HN