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

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

#371

Post by Barrin92 »

gonehome wrote: post #14

“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“ This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji). This is wrong. What’s legal and what’s right are not the same th…

>What’s legal and what’s right are not the same thing[...]and in countries with bad laws (Middle East, China)

What are bad laws, whatever people socialised in the anglosphere deem bad? You don't have a monopoly on ethics, sorry. Companies should behave legally, they're not the extended arm of the respective culture they reside in, because if they are we will constantly pester each other with our respective moral values and that's a recipe for conflict.

The solution is pretty simple. Chinese companies need to stop censoring things in the US, the US needs to stop trying to spread its values beyond her own borders, and we can all do business in peace.

What we don't need is countries with messianic attitudes interfering in each other's affairs, and to give businesses primacy over the law in sovereign nations.

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

#372

Post by Melting_Harps »

6AA4FD wrote: post #160
Melting_Harps wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When Zoom is requested to send over names and videos of political dissidents to authoritarian leaders will they comply? No, the CCP will just get the UN (according to Humans Right Lawyer at the UN) to do it for them: https://thehumanoid.net/un-whistleblower-emma-reilly-un-huma... Cool handle, I wished more people would just stop using propriety closed source software, we can at least try and make inroads that way.…

I'm very suspicious of this article. I've watched a decent bit of the interview, and I'm concerned about the lack of verification that she is in fact a UN employee as she claims, and the absence of any incriminating emails she mentions in the interview. Quick edit: It just occurred to me to search for other articles by the whistleblower's name. I still don't see any evidence so I am skeptical, but anyone else reading…

Interesting, I havevn't followed up on it, but the UN recently did come out to deny these claims in a recent press conference, which didn't deny she was an employee there.

But you're right details are not easy to self-verify; but given what the CCP has done and continue to do with the WHO is it really all that far-fetched to see they paid off a bunch if UN members to pass them information. Consider how the US needed operatives/assets inside the Iranian nuclear program to deploy what eventually would become Stuxnet-gate.

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

#373

Post by jrockway »

katbyte wrote: post #357
jrockway wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My iPhone doesn't attempt to censor tiananmen square. Typing "tian" into the home screen search bar yields "tiananmen square", "tiana", "tiananmen square massacre", and "tiana musarra".

Maybe it’s chrome? I got a red squiggly line under tiananmen and presumed it was iOS. That’s my bad

Maybe the spell checker wanted you to capitalize it? Discord's spell check constantly tells me I've spelled "chicago", "wednesday", and "february" wrong. They're spelled right, but because they're proper nouns, they MUST be capitalized at any cost. It drives me mad.

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

#374

Post by gonehome »

fomine3 wrote: post #304
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative is to not be in China at all. The problem with that of course, if that the softwares that do comply will suddently win an unfair market advantage against the ones taking a moral stand.

This. Google does this for a long time while competitors don't do this but weirdly Google isn't praised well in HN or other places.

Google's history here isn't so clean.

They spun backing out of China as something they did in the interest of free speech, but it was more a response to them getting hacked by the CCP (it's still not clear what was stolen, but something big happened).

More recently they were trying to re-enter the space with a search engine designed to fully comply with the CCP's censorship laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

It's unclear what caused that to get shut down, but its leak and subsequent public pressure was probably a factor.

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

#375

Post by gonehome »

tomComb wrote: post #365
HenryBemis wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> authoritarian leaders will they comply? Apologies for the seemingly seagull-ish comment/rant, but it is 100% true: "money talks, bullshit walks". Zoom is not going to miss out a 1bn ppl market because of ethics. Apple will not miss out a 1bn market because of ethics. Blackberry handed the keys to the kingdom so fast the heads of the tortured people were spinning, and the tale goes on and on. Autocratic regimes play…

Google is the one company that did walk away from a billion person market - and a strong, established position in it - when asked to censor, and you want to boycott then too? It's no wonder companies don't bother doing the right thing. People just ignore that massive sacrifice and pull out some other reason to not like Google.

I wrote this earlier, but the thread has become massive and hard to navigate so I figured I would respond to you here.

Google's history isn't so clean either.

They spun backing out of China as something they did in the interest of free speech, but it was more a response to them getting hacked by the CCP (it's still not clear what was stolen, but something big happened).

More recently they were trying to re-enter the space with a search engine designed to fully comply with the CCP's censorship laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

It's unclear what caused that to get shut down, but its leak and subsequent public pressure was probably a factor.

That said, I still think people within these companies should try to do the right thing (specifically that includes developers like us that make up these companies).

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

#376

Post by unishark »

pnako wrote: post #231
alisonatwork wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in China. It makes a very big difference. "Angry mobs", as you put it, are just ordinary people freely expressing their opinions to companies that they choose to do business with. No company is forced to comply with the requests of an "angry mob". No government agency is going to punish a company that doesn't comply. Nobody is getting thrown in prison for something they said online. Please, it does a disservic…

You moved the goalpost from censorship to prison. We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China. As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear…

I certainly agree people are being hypocrites if they only support freedom of speech for speech they agree with. Of course that isn't everyone. Or even close to a majority. The big tech companies tend to have extreme left-leaning leadership nowadays, presumably due to their location in SF/Seattle.

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

#377

Post by monocasa »

deathgrips wrote: post #362
fit2rule wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahem Julian Assange cough America is no better than China when it comes to repressing dissent. American military industrial pharmaceutical organisations are better at usurping insurrection and revolutionary movements, however.

Julian Assange knew what he was getting in to when he voluntarily got a security clearance, accessed information he wasn't authorized to access, and then leaked that information to the entire planet in violation of his security clearance. The leaks accomplished nothing of concrete positive value. He was perfectly free to leave government work and become a political activist without leaking classified information.

What? Julien Assange never received a clearance, he was simply the publisher.

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

#378

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

theferalrobot wrote: post #370
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forcing the entire world to stop trading with a country is way more serious than forcing a nonlocal video conferencing company to suspend an account. The extraterritorial application of US economic sanctions goes way beyond anything any other country is doing to impose its laws abroad.

You are referring to things that were agreed to in international treaties and trade negotiations - again these sorts of things are super common

No, I'm referring to unilateral measures the US takes to force countries that do not themselves have sanctions against Iran and Cubs to stop trading with those countries.

These secondary sanctions are not based on international treaties and trade negotiations. They're based on levers of power that the US possesses and exploits, much to the chagrin of foreign countries. They are also not common. There's no other country that comes close to imposing its trade policy on the rest of the world in this manner.

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

#379

Post by redis_mlc »

crazygringo wrote: post #326
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.

When will this meme die? Zoom is NOT a Chinese company. It is incorporated in and headquartered in the US. Like any American company ever, it follows US laws in the US, and local laws in other companies where it operates. End of story. Yes their culture certainly has stronger cultural internal ties to China, due to the number of Chinese employees, but what has that got to do with anything? At the end of the day, they…

> It's not like they're secretly and nefariously doing the CCP's bidding

Yes, Chinese citizens do the bidding of the CCP or they or their families will be disappeared.

The courts are not independent of the CCP, so there is no recourse to whatever the CCP demands.

Can you explain why you think otherwise?

Are you just engaging in false equivalence of Chinese and US governments, or do you have another reason for your defense of the CCP?

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

#380

Post by redis_mlc »

crazygringo wrote: post #353
Medicalidiot wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Zoom's product development team is largely based in China The main players are under CCP command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications#Work...

A company's "main players" are its board and senior management. "Under command" means they report to someone. Can you please explain how you think the board members and management of Zoom -- an American publicly traded company -- report to the CCP? Because that is certainly not what your Wikipedia link says.

The CCP has access to most of Zoom's developers, so they can direct them to do anything at any time.

Zoom's filings disclose that in fact.

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