Zoom shuts down a human rights account to comply with Chinese law
Applied the wrong filter... Zoom. An American human rights org hosted a Zoom conference to commemorate the lives lost in Tiananmen Square 31 years ago. Then Zoom shut the account down. Zooming out...
- Tiananmen Square Massacre: In 1989, a million pro-democracy protesters hit the streets of Beijing against repressive Communist leaders/policies. The Chinese government cracked down hard, killing hundreds, thousands, or "at least 10K" people (exact number is unknown).
- Censored: In China, it's illegal to discuss what happened in Tiananmen Square. So since Chinese citizens joined the conference, Zoom decided to shut down the US-based account "to comply with local law."
- Zoom's response: "It is not in Zoom’s power to change the laws of governments opposed to free speech.” So what is in companies' power?
What this company did... Pocket Casts, a popular podcast app, just said it won't censor content based on China's requests: “We believe podcasting is and should remain free of government censorship.” That principled move resulted in Pocket Casts getting removed from the App Store in China yesterday.
- "All-or-nothing" approach: Tech companies aren't thrilled to get blocked off from billions of potential users in China. But Pocket Casts went "all-or-nothing."
- "Censored" approach: What Zoom just chose. Also, what LinkedIn does by offering a censored version of itself in China. In 2018, Google worked on a censored search engine for Chinese users, but backed down after US public outcry.
The world has two internets... What else is blocked in China? Facebook, Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, Slack, and pretty much every other platform that freely spews people's every thought. Tech companies have to decide if they'll go "all-or-nothing" or "censored" with China. Either way, China has had no problem creating its own gov-censored social copycats (like WeChat for WhatsApp and Weibo for Twitter).