Zoom Deleted Events Discussing Zoom “Censorship”

(buzzfeednews.com)

505 points | by aspenmayer 1250 days ago

20 comments

  • fossuser 1250 days ago
    I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

    That they would continue to support the CCP’s interests under a banner of “operating within the laws of the country” is not a surprise.

    > “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations”

    This is total nonsense and is demonstrated by their actions - Zoom is an unethical company rationalizing bad behavior and people should avoid using them.

    I know their software is the best (webex is awful), but they can’t be trusted to even care about doing the right thing.

    Longer form thoughts on this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html

    I’m not sure why organizations across the globe trust a company with the majority of its devs operating out of China and vulnerable to CCP influence. There’s a reason the client is banned at Google, and elsewhere in USG.

    It’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries.

    • oefrha 1250 days ago
      > It’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries.

      This line made me grin. Ironically enough, YouTube and Facebook also censored the exact same event that sparked this later event. (Actually the role of YouTube in this episode makes the parent comment doubly funny, considering "banned at Google" is listed as evidence that Zoom is evil™.) I found out when trying to learn who exactly Leila Khaled is from Wikipedia. There was apparently even an "End Jew Hatred on Zoom" protest in front of Zoom headquarters demanding Zoom to cancel the event, pictured in [3]. Of course now Zoom’s getting all the flak because any bad PR for them can be pinned on you know who, and fed to an existing narrative.

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled

      [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200927005246/https://www.insid...

      [3] https://www.jweekly.com/2020/09/22/after-protest-zoom-will-n...

      [4] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/zoom-criticised-cancellin...

      [5] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/24/21453935/zoom-facebook-yo...

      • godelski 1250 days ago
        This is a weird comparison to make: Leila Khaled vs Tiananmen Square Massacre. While I both don't agree with Khaled and also think that she should have had her event, there's a large difference between canceling someone who is currently advocating for violence and student protestors. Khaled is a self proclaimed freedom fighter who hijacked 2 planes. Tiananmen Square Massacre is students getting shot by their government. I'm not sure how you equate these things unless I am gravely misinformed about Tiananmen Square and it was really a rebel group of students that were freedom fighters advocating and participating in violent actions against the government. As far as I know, that's not the case. Comparing the two removes any actual context between these events. There's this large scale difference. You can't just say because X country isn't perfect that Y country can do whatever they want. Scale matters. Nuance matters. You also can't call country X hypocritical based on people complaining about country Y because, at least in western countries, you'll find those people are often complaining about similar things in their home country X (meaning ideology is consistent). I'll even say that criticizing America is a national past time (and how democracies work, you only improve by finding your flaws).
        • ponker 1250 days ago
          And this is why free speech (beyond what the First Amendment guarantees) is important. We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it.
          • godelski 1250 days ago
            While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity. If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes. This gets complicated because these online platforms blur the lines between public and private spaces. Objectively they are private spaces because the companies own the "land." But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world. There'd also be an inherit danger to making those platforms a real public space, controlled by governments (who's!). The case is honestly really messy and we don't need to overly simplify it, we need to solve the problem (as a society) and figure out how to move forward.
            • robertlagrant 1250 days ago
              > If strong man Randy Savage wanted to give a public speech on your front lawn, you should have the right to say no because that's your property. You should also be able to say yes.

              Correct. Because of private property laws, not free speech. The problem isn't (exactly) whether companies have a right to do this. The problem is that increasingly they are our primary method of communication, and want to be, and with lockdowns, have to be.

              If private companies are the only way we communicate, we may still have a free speech problem. Just as if everyone only communicated using yoghurt pots and strings, and a private company owned the strings and decided whose should be cut.

              • godelski 1250 days ago
                I mean... this is what I'm trying to get at and why it is complicated. The issue I see is that the conversation has become reductionist. I see a few options:

                1) Business as usual (i.e. private entities make their own rules on their own property).

                2) We classify these as public spaces. We then run into problems of "all" or "of a certain size." Both of which will have weird effects. "All" makes it difficult for competitors or niche groups (do we allow all articles on HN?). Of a certain size means companies have to transition and creates a new major speed bump in companies going through that transition.

                3) We create a government owned platform. Now we'd be legally required to have free speech protected as this is clearly public property and free speech applies to government controlled platforms. But this has the downside of potential for abuse and turnkey tyranny. This becomes a bigger problem because these platforms tend to be multi-national. So does each nation run their own? Do we connect them? Does the UN run it?

                4) We radically restructure the internet to be privacy forward. No one can dip their fingers in the pudding and taste it. No governments, no private entities. Do we do this centralized? Federated? Mixture? Do we do domain fronting? Do we force large private entities to facilitate such techniques so that we have a cultural fight? (i.e. encourage secure communications in oppressed countries) Or do we leave everyone alone?

                There's a lot of other options too, but I see these as at least covering a few major points. The conversation is really difficult and we need to think about how to solve it and what the problems are instead of just shouting about it being a problem. I think everyone agrees that it is a problem, so let's move the conversation forward. Especially on a form for people that are able to solve many of the technological challenges to some of the above options. But society needs to decide the societal parts of the solutions and that requires discussion.

                • amanaplanacanal 1250 days ago
                  I like option number 3. Anybody who wants to can use it. I predict that we would quickly see it overrun by spammers and other idiots, and it would become obvious that very few people really want to use a “free speech” platform.
                  • godelski 1250 days ago
                    I think #3 is nice if you have a lot of trust for your government. With the global rise in authoritarian values, I think many are very wary of this option, myself included. I think not only the points I brought up before need to be addressed, but there's also the fact that government services tend to not be... sub par.
                • kazagistar 1250 days ago
                  The speed bump in option 2 isn't that big of a worry, right? Its the classic sotuation of once you are big enough to habe the problem, you are big enough to afford to solve it.
                  • godelski 1250 days ago
                    I think this is naive thinking. That transition can be some of the most difficult time for companies. Even for countries. Think of it analogous to the middle income trap. This usually isn't an issue for the people that are first to producing a product, but if you're building a competing product then it is a danger. Potentially. Of course there will be companies that succeed and I may be too conservative. But it is, I think, at least worth considering. Something to keep an eye on if you choose that route.
            • Natsu 1250 days ago
              Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people. I don't see how that can remain the case and democracy can survive when you need only a handful of sites to censor some topic.

              It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse.

              This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.

              • kazagistar 1250 days ago
                Progressive free speech? Megacorporarions cannot censor, but people on their lawn can? Everyone uses the "would you like it if you couldn't censor your local coffee shop from nazis" or whatever example, but that intentionally ignores power dynamics that can be accounted for. Censorship's moral hazard against democracy only really comes into play at scale, so we can provide protection accordingly.
              • root_axis 1250 days ago
                > Currently a handful of billionaire oligarchs own a majority of the sites used for public discourse by ordinary people

                They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.

                • Natsu 1250 days ago
                  > They own the sites, not the people or their discourse.

                  They sure believe they own the people and they do own the discourse, sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it. And this is part of the problem--that they censor communications between willing participants.

                  We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.

                  The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.

                  Otherwise, one of these days, someone you don't approve of will get power over these companies and then it will be too late to regret it.

                  I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.

                  With great power should come great responsibility. I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.

                  • root_axis 1249 days ago
                    > sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it

                    This is obviously false. These companies might reserve limited rights to reshare or redisplay your content at their discretion, but it is 100% wrong to say they have "unlimited IP rights" to anything posted by users.

                    > We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.

                    Websites are not phone companies. The reason why phone companies are different is because they control finite physical resources which are fundamentally essential to the logistics of communication. If the 3 most popular phone companies collude to exclude you from the network, communication becomes nearly impossible. This is not true of websites which sit at a higher level of abstraction, if the 3 most popular websites banned you there would still be many millions of alternative websites and communication platforms available to you or you could create your own venue or platform which is just as capable (if not nearly as popular) as any of the alternatives.

                    > The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.

                    Why? Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights? Should the same rules apply to arbitrarily popular books, movies, tv, or radio? What is it about a website that makes you believe the creative control of a popular website's content and behavior should be abdicated to the government?

                    > I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.

                    I don't care about "nazis on the front lawn", I simply reject the idea that someone other than the owner of a website should be dictating what appears on a website, especially based on an arbitrary metric like popularity.

                    > I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.

                    This characterization is just wrong. If you don't want your speech controlled by a cartel of billionaires then stop posting your speech to websites literally controlled by billionaires. It's very easy and very cheap to do and many people have been doing it for many years.

                    • ponker 1249 days ago
                      There are millions of alternative websites but behind those websites are a small number of infrastructure providers who can, and do, completely end a website's ability to operate. Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896051

                      The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else. The reality is that even though there are millions of websites out there, if one of them starts to become popular and becomes a locus of bad content, if the ~20 or so companies that control the Internet clamp down on them and there's very little they can do about it.

                      https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-neo-...

                      > Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights?

                      Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes? Law defines the boundaries of property rights. You can't start a tire fire in your backyard and expect your neighbors to just say "it's his property, nothing we can do."

                      • root_axis 1249 days ago
                        > Just today, PayPal terminated the account of one of them

                        PayPal terminated thier account because they run a digital currency and could not satisfy PayPal's KYC inquiries. This is nothing new.

                        > The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else

                        So what? How do you think things should be different? I am personally ok with companies coordinating to shut out Nazis, tens of millions of people died to deafeat them and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to say "you know what, I don't want to do businesses with nazis". I understand the fear of a slippery-slope, but keep in mind that the slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a fallacy, and I see no evidence to suggest that this is actually a widespread problem, with the example of the dailystormer and like two others constantly reused to emphasize your point. If there is enough demand for Nazi website hosting, someone will fill the market need, same as with porn and other things some people don't like.

                        > Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes?

                        What are you talking about? Racial discrimination is illegal in the U.S regardless of how popular your restaurant is. Also, refusing to serve food to black people isn't the same thing as refusing to display nazi ideas on your website.

                • hanselot 1250 days ago
                  With the number of studies that show how addicting social media is, are people really free to leave?

                  It takes just one family member or friend to post events on insert platform X here, to lure a person back.

            • astrobe_ 1250 days ago
              Operators of social medias are judge, jury and executioners by full right. But corporations are not democratic entities. They are subject to the democratic (or not) laws of the countries where they operate, but they also are subject to unwritten profit laws.

              I think the answer is in decentralized networks, because they are controlled neither by governments nor by companies.

            • apostacy 1250 days ago
              Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense.

              I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens who want people to stay off their lawns and not have the government regulate their IRC server that they run out of their basement.

              If you don't just own a lawn, but you own every lawn in the town and every single space where people could congregate, then no I don't think you should have absolute control over who can use it. Coal corporations and sharecroppers tried doing that a century ago with "company towns".

              If you own more than a certain amount of property, you have responsibilities as well as rights. You can't just build your own little nation within a nation, because you can afford the land. And you certainly can't use your money and influence to bully and evict people because you disagree with them. Many churches have done that in the past.

              You can't circumvent our laws by just privatizing everything.

              Internet platforms over a certain size need to be required to reflect American values.

              • anchpop 1249 days ago
                > Are you comparing Facebook's property to a person's lawn? Because that is nonsense.

                > I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens ...

                You can compare two things without them being exactly the same in every way. Two things being different doesn't mean they shouldn't be compared. The point the GP was making is that in this context, the difference between Facebook and HN (or any other small site) is one of scale, not kind. They acknowledge that there may be a need for regulation anyway when they write:

                > But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world.

                Which I think is clearly indicating that Facebook's property should not necessarily be treated the same as someone's lawn.

            • layoutIfNeeded 1250 days ago
              >strong man Randy Savage

              macho man Randy Savage

              • godelski 1250 days ago
                I have made a grave mistake and I apologize to Macho Man Randy Savage and the entire Macho Man community.
            • ponker 1250 days ago
              The law forces private property owners to pay taxes they don’t want to. The law forces restaurants to serve “coloreds” even if they don’t want to. Private property rights operate within limits circumscribed by the law. And a good law to govern that is the First Amendment. Just extend First Amendment rights to online spaces that are operated by monopolies or near-monopolies.
              • xxpor 1250 days ago
                Go look at the majority of 1st amendment cases in the courts the past few years. They're mostly corporations arguing against regulations as free speech issues.

                The jurisprudence, largely from "conservative" judges, is that "speech" is any expression, and it applies to corporations. Ironically, that's what'll make it tough to regulate Facebook/Twitter/etc. They didn't see the 2nd order affects coming.

                • prirun 1249 days ago
                  The ridiculous part is that a corporation was given "personhood" by the law, with all the rights that people have. A corporation is not a person.

                  Here's the 1st amendment:

                  "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

                  What works for me is to replace the words Congress & government with Facebook, Twitter, or any company with a certain market share. If you want to be a corporation that facilitates communication between thousands of people, you're subject to the rule, ie, you lose some of your private property rights. If you have fewer than say 1000 users, do what you want: only private property rules apply.

            • kodah 1250 days ago
              > While I'm a big advocator for free speech (I think companies should act like Signal and wash their hands of it), there's a difference between a government censoring an event and a public entity

              This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too.

              My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good".

              The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.

            • netheril96 1249 days ago
              In that case, why is Zoom's censoring a problem at all?
          • root_axis 1250 days ago
            > We shouldn't be having Zuckerberg or Pichai's opinion on the relative moral differences between Leila Khaled and the CCP affect what speech we can hear regarding it.

            Then don't use Zuckerberg or Pichai's website. Your website works on the exact same internet as theirs.

            • AnthonyMouse 1250 days ago
              Which is fine until Zuckerberg buys the other websites you might use too, or Pichai stops listing the ones you do use in the search results on the search engine that 92% of your readers use.
              • root_axis 1250 days ago
                Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog. Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query.
                • AnthonyMouse 1249 days ago
                  > Zuckerberg will never buy out your blog.

                  Maybe if you host it on a server which is physically in your house, but most ordinary people don't really have the chops for that, or the resources. Comcast tends to frown upon it. And when they use Instagram because they didn't like Facebook, that's still Zuckerberg.

                  > Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query.

                  They can have editorial control or they can have a monopoly, but not both. But agreed that trying to regulate search results is a fool's game. Dissolving the monopoly is almost certainly the better way to fix this class of problem, across the board.

            • ponker 1250 days ago
              What if McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Subway all decided to ban people whose name started with R? I’d be out of luck on any road trips and would have to look harder and pay more for a meal, and it would be grossly unfair. You can say “it’s their restaurant their rules” but I think that the law should tell them to get fucked, and I think that most would agree.
              • root_axis 1249 days ago
                > What if McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, KFC, and Subway all decided to ban people whose name started with R

                This isn't a good analogy for several reasons. To start with, restaurants exist in physical space, so losing access to a popular restaurant chain makes it more difficult to eat since you might have to travel farther to find food. This isn't an issue for a website since the cost to "travel" to any http website is always the same regardless of the site.

                The next problem is that you're comparing food to use of a website. It might be problematic if all the fast food in your town is owned by a handful of companies that coordinate to exclude you, since we all recognize that food is a basic human need, having your post banned from a website however is a meaningless triviality in comparison.

                Finally, it is not convincing to suggest that being banned by 6 very popular fast food restaurants is a serious harm society should seek to prevent, just eat somewhere else, there are many alternative options and many new ones appearing daily, just like with various internet websites.

          • aspaceman 1250 days ago
            This is so densely hard to respond to. The idea of rhetoric crystallizing is apt here.

            Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? You seem yo be making this grand slippery slope argument, that by banning this person “WHO NEXT”. It’s a nonsensical position. I don’t care who’s next because it’s fucking YouTube and all you have to do to exert your “free speech” is write a book, stage a protest, whatever.

            When YouTube shut this down, they did not silence this person. They didn’t prevent you from finding this information. Arguing that all speech is being silenced is genuinely idiotic in my view and speaks to a larger persecution complex.

            YouTube is not the government. If you want it to be, integrate it as a utility or something. But no, I don’t need Nazis or terrorists on YouTube. I’m not afraid of a chilling effect. And I’m genuinely thrilled they’ve been removed from a platform I frequent. Because they suck.

            On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. It is valuable information. Crucial information and information that I want disseminated, preserved, and a part of the platforms I frequent.

            • pessimizer 1250 days ago
              > Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform?

              Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone? Not rhetorical; we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone so we neither have to monitor all phone calls nor come up with and administrate a corporate definition of violence.

              > On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre.

              A patriotic Chinese person asks: Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for terrorism on the platform?

              • aspaceman 1250 days ago
                You’re acting like it’s a constantly sliding scale, that’s it’s impossible to make a decision about what’s good and what’s bad, so no one should make any decisions at all. I disagree emphatically with that position.

                Denying the Holocaust = bad

                Tiannemen square protests = good

                Making these decisions is not impossible and saying we just can’t decide does not track with me as a valid argument.

                People can tell the difference between Tiannemen and terrorism when you give them the info to do so. You don’t need to show someone nazis and Holocaust denial so they know it exists.

                I understand the position you take, so don’t be so condescending about “well what would a Chinese person think”. You’re entirely missing my point.

                • jtbayly 1250 days ago
                  As long as you happen to be a liberal American, I suppose you’ll never be concerned with letting Google be the one that makes the decisions.

                  Or, you know, unless they happen to ban you for absolutely no reason.

                  • shadowsfall 1250 days ago
                    Yup. Only when it's the liberal viewpoint being protected is this whole "free speech doesn't matter" thing relevant. God forbid youtube removes a Don Lemon video, then it's censorship and against the 1st amendment.
                • shadowsfall 1250 days ago
                  But here you are advocating for things you agree with being allowed but things you don't being banned. What happens when someone conservative takes over youtube and then they ban what you think is good? I bet you'd change your mind about free speech pretty quickly.
                • sokoloff 1250 days ago
                  I think it is a sliding scale. Should we be permitted to discuss whether the moon landing was faked? Whether 9/11 was an inside job? Whether Hunter Biden dropped off his laptop someplace other than overwhelmingly the most likely place? Whether Trump has ties to Russia? Whether the gender differences in computer programming are satisfactorily explained by choices or not? Are lockdowns still justified? Should we force people to be vaccinated? If so, can we force a first-revision COVID vaccine on everyone? Should capital gains be taxed like ordinary income? Should we have a pledge of allegiance? Should it include “under God”?

                  There are hundreds of tough questions, even if you don’t find any of those difficult to adjudicate (whether they can be discussed and examined).

                  I fall pretty strongly on the “the government shall let everyone discuss everything” side (yes, including Nazi rhetoric and being a racist sphincter), because it’s too easy for me to imagine the danger of leaving the government in the business of judging which thoughts and speech are categorically “acceptable for society”.

                  Society can do that better than the government can, IMO.

                  https://xkcd.com/1357/

        • oefrha 1250 days ago
          I’m utterly confused by your comment. I’m providing background info of this “censorship” event which is briefly mentioned in TFA (but knowing HN, a large percentage of people won’t read TFA at all and will instead walk away thinking the top moment captures all they need to know). Where did I make the comparison and who started the comparison exactly?
          • godelski 1250 days ago
            You're the one that made the comparison of the event in the article to Tiananmen Square. You did this by responding to a comment that was addressing it. You made the comparison because the gp brought up Tiananmen Square as a comparison for Zoom being different. You countered this by saying Google and Facebook are the same because they canceled an event with someone who is classified as a terrorist. Now I'm saying "these two aren't the same, that's not a fair comparison."

            Does that clear it up?

            • oefrha 1250 days ago
              No, a comment to another comment doesn’t have to be an exact rebuttal of everything mentioned in that comment. HN comments, especially at the top, tend to shape the entire discussion, and I’d rather bring in context of this specific article than follow canned talking points.

              We can stop here, nothing is gonna come out of further finger pointing.

      • fossuser 1250 days ago
        It’s not because western companies never do the wrong thing (ignoring the specifics of your example). They do and I specifically address this in the long form blog post I linked.

        They’re not comparable because the western companies are not doing this due to the threat of retaliation from their own government.

        There’s more nuance here (which I address in that blog post). I wrote that so I wouldn’t have to rewrite the same stuff every time this issue comes up.

        The reason I said it’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries is because otherwise the first reply every time I write something like this is a false equivalence about how the “<insert western country here> is the same if not worse...” which is just not true.

        • fvdessen 1250 days ago
          > They’re not comparable because the western companies are not doing this due to the threat of retaliation from their own government.

          Iranians are banned from using some western apps by threat of the American government.

          • srtjstjsj 1250 days ago
            Yes, that's national sovereignty.

            A better example is when the FBI seizes webhosts whose users are associated with illegal activity.

        • oefrha 1250 days ago
          Sorry and feel free to flag, but I’m afraid discussing topics of censorship and government retaliation especially surrounding terrorism with <removed> leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

          Edit: Decided to use better judgement and remove the reference to parent’s employer, which is against guidelines. Sorry dang.

          • fossuser 1250 days ago
            Suit yourself - you should want people who give a shit about this kind of stuff working in the highest risk areas where they can have the most impact.

            Being skeptical of motivated reasoning is fine, but dismissing the content of arguments entirely because of (a likely wrong) impression of where they work is not.

        • BoorishBears 1250 days ago
          It really isn't clear what kind of distinction you're trying to make.

          You replied to a post about companies trying to appease the CCP trying to imply that it's a problem with chinese companies trying to appease the CCP

          You've just been told western companies are also trying to appease the CCP.

          How is that not comparable? Somehow not being China-based gives you a pass to play the appeasement game?

          • oefrha 1250 days ago
            > You've just been told western companies are also trying to appease the CCP.

            Sorry for having to state the obvious, but I never told them that, and I strongly suspect canceling a speaking engagement of a Palestinian terrorist (designated by the U.S.) after Jewish protests in the U.S. neither appeases nor angers China.

            • BoorishBears 1249 days ago
              The wording of your comment strongly implies otherwise, it wasn't past the point of being able to edit it I'd strongly suggest doing so for clarity

              > Ironically enough, YouTube and Facebook also censored the exact same event that sparked this later event.

              Reads like the Zoom event (later event) mentioned is the same topic as previously censored

              -

              But that's fine since Faceboom and Google very commonly _do_ go out of their way to appease the CCP, it'd be silly to imply otherwise when we've got

              - senators writing to Google about their censorship on behalf of the CCP (https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-demands-google-...)

              - Google's Chinese ventures trickling down technology to their military (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3663852)

              - Project Dragonfly...

              - Facebook formerly attempting to re-enter the Chinese market with additional censorship (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-china-idUSKBN13I...)

              Facebook tried and failed to appease the CCP for many years: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/10/17/mark-zucke...

              At the end of the day these companies are behemoths well beyond the point of having things like morals. They'll work with whoever they believe will work with them.

              • fossuser 1248 days ago
                I actually agree with you and mention dragonfly as an example specifically in my blog post.

                I think it's wrong when western companies appease the CCP too. The Tiananmen Square example is better than the messier one in the article because it's a clear case of a government leveraging its power to cover up its own abuse.

                The distinction I was trying to make is about the company being based in a non-democratic country. In the west companies are choosing to appease the CCP for their own self-interest and access to the Chinese market (which is wrong), but companies operating out of China are forced to comply if they want to exist at all.

                It's not possible for Chinese companies to exist and make the right choice, so they're going to make the wrong choice (and we'd be better off avoiding them entirely).

                The distinction is between the governments and how they operate which makes the pressure on the companies different. It's not to excuse western companies from making similarly bad concessions.

                In the end dragonfly was abandoned by Google.

                Zoom can never choose to ignore the CCP's censorship requests and remain a company while continuing to operate with the majority of its devs in China.

                Zoom knows this and doesn't care.

    • dimitrios1 1250 days ago
      I have found Jitsi meet to be not only a suitable replacement, but for video streaming quality, superior.
      • cyberbanjo 1250 days ago
        I've only ever used zoom in browser but jitsi does use more resources, in my experience ,on Linux. but the grand scheme of things my workflow only uses video calling a few times a week. I can spare the compute to spare myself the privacy.
      • drdeadringer 1250 days ago
        A social//religious group I am apart of has been using Jitsi for our virtual meetings in lieu of physically meeting in person. It is great and has been for months -- so much so that I forget if I've ever used Zoom.
    • loosetypes 1250 days ago
      > I stopped using zoom

      Does anyone actually use zoom outside of a work capacity where they have the autonomy to make such a decision?

      On the job, could such a decision not be sufficient grounds for firing?

    • Thorrez 1250 days ago
      > That they would continue to support the CCP’s interests under a banner of “operating within the laws of the country” is not a surprise.

      It seems that China actually supports Palestine[1]. Why does banning this talk align with CCP's interests?

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Palestine_relati...

    • dheera 1250 days ago
      On the other hand, Zoom is unblocked in China and most of the other clients are blocked. For many doing cross-border communication with China it's either Wechat or Zoom, there aren't really any other choices. So maybe they're complying with Chinese government requests for business reasons more than anything else.
    • PrinceKropotkin 1250 days ago
      Ironically this link is only a few notches above "GitLab ceases operations in Iran".

      Sure, it's a different situation and arguably not a comparable form of censorship, but it's certainly a case of a state leaning on companies to adjust who they do business with. I would argue with far more substantial, immediate harm....

    • baja_blast 1249 days ago
      One thing that always bothered me about Zoom is the fact you need to download their software. I prefer the safety and convenience of video chat through the browser. Downloading and executing software is too risky IMO.
    • GrayTextIsTruth 1250 days ago
      > It’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries.

      You read the article? It's censoring due to pressure from Israeli (democratic) and jewish lobbies over talks of Palestinian liberation.

    • ThrowawayR2 1250 days ago
      > "I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre."

      Now, now, many HN readers in recent political threads have piously reminded us that corporations have no obligation to allow speech they don't want to host and it's perfectly okay for corporations to deplatform things because it would never be used in bad way. Surely, they could not be wrong? Surely...?

      • kevinh 1250 days ago
        I haven't seen anyone hold that platforms shouldn't be allowed to deplatform things and that people shouldn't be free to choose to stop using them because of those decisions.

        Can you point me to a comment that says that?

        • FeepingCreature 1250 days ago
          I think platforms shouldn't be allowed to deplatform things, fwiw.

          So now you've seen one such person. :)

          • qubex 1250 days ago
            Allow me to introduce you the most persecuted and deplatformed community in the whole social network world: nudists.
          • strawberrypuree 1250 days ago
            How about in situations where the speech is likely to get them banned from a country, or lose advertisers, or generally turn away users because of its association with speech that it doesn't like? Should businesses be forced to accommodate speech that threatens their livelihoods?
            • FeepingCreature 1250 days ago
              Per-country filter list. Ie. to the minimum feasible amount.

              Platforms can figure out what ads you should get based on tracking from incredibly specific coincidences of IP addresses and browser user agents. I'm sure they can figure out what ads should not appear next to what content.

              • strawberrypuree 1249 days ago
                That doesn’t solve the brand reputation problem. Some users don’t want to be on a site that has anything to do with controversial / unsavory content. Bars have a right to refuse service to anyone for any reason not protected by law (race, etc.). Social media is the online equivalent of the watering hole; should not they be afforded the same right?
                • FeepingCreature 1249 days ago
                  No.

                  If people don't want to be on a site with someone, even if they don't have to interact with them, then that's just too bad. I will always favor local, positive rights over global, negative rights.

                  The right to > The right for somebody else to not.

                  I'm a value utilitarian. I think society should be organized so that humans can follow their interests. As such, I believe it is counterproductive for people to have an interest in others not following their interests; that's an interest that reduces net interest satisfaction rather than raises it.

          • kevinh 1250 days ago
            My comment may have been vaguely worded. I meant that I hadn't met someone who held both of those views simultaneously.
          • jhardy54 1250 days ago
            Why do you believe that private companies should be coerced into hosting content they disagree with? Seems rather dystopian and authoritarian to me.
            • FeepingCreature 1250 days ago
              Because I value individual over corporate freedom.

              It's authoritarian in the sense that, say, the GPL is authoritarian. It restricts one freedom to widen another.

              • jhardy54 1250 days ago
                That doesn't follow.

                If I (an individual) start a web host (a company) and the KKK (an organization) wants to pay me money, why shouldn't I have the right to say no?

                I'd prefer we had 'freedom from coercion to provide services for bad causes' rather than 'freedom to make anyone provide services to you'.

                • FeepingCreature 1249 days ago
                  And I think it should be the other way around.

                  Yes, that means I want to coerce people to provide service. On the other hand, if they don't want it, they can always stop providing that service entirely.

                  • jhardy54 1249 days ago
                    Why?

                    I can't imagine why your view of utopia requires that people with money get to choose who they transact with but people with goods and services must transact with anyone who has money. Can you explain why that's fair or equitable?

                    You're pointing toward a world where I can say "I won't buy from X because Y" but nobody can say "I won't sell to X because Y".

                    If a seller doesn't believe in mask wearing, a buyer should be able to abstain from them. If a buyer doesn't believe in mask wearing, a seller should be able to abstain from them.

                    Buyers and sellers are temporary roles we play, not classes of people with different freedoms.

                    • FeepingCreature 1249 days ago
                      > I can't imagine why your view of utopia requires that people with money get to choose who they transact with but people with goods and services must transact with anyone who has money. Can you explain why that's fair or equitable?

                      This is not entirely an accurate description of my view. I think that also, people with money should not get to choose who they transact with on the basis of not directly related properties; the difference is not "buy vs sell" but one of scale. That is, I also think that for instance a large corporate chain shouldn't be able to choose to not buy from somebody on the basis of political allegiance. "Offering a service or product to the market" and "Acquiring a service or product from the market" are symmetrical.

              • pertymcpert 1250 days ago
                What's a platform?
                • FeepingCreature 1249 days ago
                  I would apply this to any company offering a service or product to the general public.
                  • jhardy54 1249 days ago
                    You give rights to people who offer money, not to people who offer goods and services. Why?

                    Also: what happens when both parties are offering money (e.g. currency exchange)? Can both of them choose who to transact with?

                    And if neither party has money (e.g. barter) then I assume that you think they should be coerced into working with each other?

                    • FeepingCreature 1249 days ago
                      No, you can always choose not to interact at all. You can always choose not to offer a service or product, or not to use a service or product. I just think that the larger the scale at which you decide what to do, the less interests that are not directly related should be permitted to matter.
        • whateveracct 1250 days ago
          Some people can't think in anything more than black and white it seems :/
      • klyrs 1250 days ago
        Involvement of government is the distinguishing factor. Platforms can curate their content as an exercise of free speech; governments forcing their hand on particular issues is censorship.
        • gnusty_gnurc 1250 days ago
          But even so, I think it’s wiser to argue that companies clearly do and should have the right to vet content. But any platform that claims to be an open forum for communication should be criticized when they censor things and act in heavy-handed ways.
          • klyrs 1250 days ago
            Hell yes, criticize them, boycott them, etc. Just because they've got a right to do something mustn't protect them from criticism and loss of public confidence.
        • twirlock 1250 days ago
          How about literal lobbyists? No reason Im asking.
    • microcolonel 1250 days ago
      Zoom is the CCP; they are separated only by the vaguest legal fictions.
    • vmception 1250 days ago
      I don't mind the CCP's paternal approach to platform content and I don't find it unethical for a company to comply with them.

      I don't live my day worried that people won't discuss one event from 30 years ago without reprisal.

      I understand that the idea of a public sector entity being a parent is a line in the sand, but it doesn't offend me that it is done - over there - and that some companies - over here - create a user experience that is congruent with that.

      I find the user experience pretty pleasant.

      The simple reality is that not every topic is about whats happening on the other side of the Gobi desert, or what happened 30 years ago. There are just other things to talk about and it is more normal to compartmentalize this sentiment, instead of conflating every action occurring in China with things grimmest things that party did. Because we don't do that anywhere else.

      • mdorazio 1250 days ago
        "paternal approach" is the most ridiculously white washed term I've heard used for the CCP's historical information practices... ever.
        • vmception 1250 days ago
          their paternal approach covers much more than censoring strife.
      • toxik 1250 days ago
        Right, so you basically reject the ideals of the enlightenment. This is very unusual among western peoples because we have seen what that leads to. Rejection of these ideals is essentially the bedrock under which the tripartite pact was formed during WWII.

        No, I think standing up for the right to integrity and autonomy for the individual is worth more than some economic output. Let the CCP pretend otherwise, I am sure humanity is made up of individuals, not masses to be herded like so much cattle.

        • vmception 1250 days ago
          > This is very unusual among western peoples

          Yes, I've noticed.

          The primary nuance with China is the contradiction created in their constitution. Their need - and historical rationale from various civil wars and stalemates - to "uphold territorial unity" is an element that undermines all the other articles in their constitution.

          The consolidation of control and single party exacerbates that, but there is primarily an inability of the courts to rule against this aspect of the constitution in support of other aspects of the constitution that would support free speech and other freedoms of association.

          Outside of China, we have a caricature of what people there care about, and it is simply not accurate. Outside of China, we act like everyone is a victim, imagining they are all oppressed in their ability to speak about or learn more about a military massacre. But that's simply not the case. The government keeps everything "rated PG", it spends most of its paternal energy doing that, and its pretty successful at doing that, the outcome is pretty benign and people support that. This is the expectation people have from their government, this is the social contract there. Many corporate walled gardens are the same, and service providers work inside of those walled gardens, this doesn't make the service provider unethical. I think it is disingenuous to be automatically offended just because a public sector entity acts this way.

          • srtjstjsj 1250 days ago
            Is disingenuous to claim that people believe and consent something when it's been illegal (violently prohibited) to even discuss that thing for over a generation. That's the same logic that says someone fed a roofie consented to their rape.

            Apple doesn't have the ability to imprison and execute me if they blaspheme in their garden. The Chinese Communist Party doesn't deserve it either.

            The "social contract" isn't a contract when it's imposed one-sidey by a violent, hypocritical power.

            • vmception 1250 days ago
              That’s correct, it is also true that most people aren’t worried about that and can live their lives in a “rated PG” environment

              Using platforms which fit that mold

              We shouldnt be vicariously offended on every topic that happens to involve the government of China

              • alisonatwork 1250 days ago
                This is a fair statement, and I think you are correct that there are those in the west do not understand this aspect of contemporary Chinese society.

                However. Just because "most people aren't worried" and "can live their lives" doesn't make the problem go away. Just because injustice doesn't affect most people doesn't mean it's not an injustice.

                When people in the west express concern about the way the CCP deals with party critics and dissidents, they aren't trying to speak for everyone in China, they are simply standing with the people who specifically are being oppressed.

                • vmception 1250 days ago
                  > they are simply standing with the people who specifically are being oppressed

                  Except on every topic tangentially related to China as a massive agreement seeking disclaimer, when there are just other things going on.

                  Other countries have problems, massive problems, rogue intelligence communities, foreign policies that contradict their ideals, literal extrajudicial killings by firing squad, property expropriation that doesn't respect private ownership, things people imagine as core tenants of communist and state-capitalist regimes which is the biggest irony, and yet it simply isn't used to derail every single topic about those countries. It just disingenuous, and it isn't even clear if people realize these things, simple as that.

                  • alisonatwork 1249 days ago
                    Of course other countries have problems. But this thread is about a specific incident where Zoom admitted to deactivating the accounts of pro-democracy activists to appease the CCP. Why shouldn't somebody make a comment about that under an article that is about Zoom deactivating other accounts, apparently to appease other powerful political groups? It shows a pattern of behavior. And it is perhaps fair to assume that the pattern of behavior is a result of the company having a big investment in China, and a significant number of employees that believe in creating a "rated PG" world, as you put it.

                    I understand where you are coming from, but I don't think this is the place to try fight the battle. What was shared here is legitimately related to the topic at hand and hopefully of interest to Hackernews readers who may not be aware of Zoom's history of "censorship" going back before the Khaled events, since it was not mentioned in the article.

  • davisr 1250 days ago
    Don't use Zoom, and better-yet, ditch proprietary software altogether! Instead, use Signal (which has incredible voice/audio quality) or Jitsi (https://meet.jit.si/).

    There are lots of other Jitsi servers, too. Pick your favorite: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instance...

    • theshrike79 1250 days ago
      Many solutions which position themselves as Zoom competitors lack any of the differentiating features. Just to pick a few:

      - Force mic mute on all participants except the presenter, disallow enabling without presenter permission

      - Webinars for thousands of people (handful of presenters with video, multiple non-video listen-only participants)

      - 50+ people with video streams enabled in one meeting

      - Smart background replace with optional green screen support

      Then there are all the features for education, split rooms etc. But just those four - to my knowledge - exist only in Zoom. Some competitors might have 1-3 of those, none of them have all four.

      We don't use Zoom because we especially love them, we use Zoom because it's the only one with the features we need.

      • mathstuf 1250 days ago
        I don't know about the greenscreen bit, but BigBlueButton is likely the closest that I know of. It may well have the feature; I've never checked it out myself. That can also be done by making a fake camera processing pipeline locally, but that's certainly not typical usage.

        Overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ Notes from deployment for a virtual conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/

      • gentleman11 1250 days ago
        You make a good point from a software point of view, but ‘features’ are not just things you code. You mention educational features: is the freedom to express ideas and to discuss important historical events not an important feature in education? It’s certainly more important than green screen cutouts but nobody ever puts it on the list explicitly
        • esyir 1250 days ago
          No. As far as a communication tool goes, if you underperform, but have a nice moral story to go with it, you'll get a nice little niche userbase that can sit there under the shadow of the bigger, better tool.
          • inglor_cz 1250 days ago
            So true. The general experience is that consumer boycotts rarely work and most people will only react to total moral outrages, if at all.
          • Brian_K_White 1250 days ago
            The question was "is freedom of discussion important to education", not if Joe Random cares enough to deviate from the path of least resistance.
        • theshrike79 1250 days ago
          If I make my living from training and presenting webinars to people of varying technical skills, I'm picking the best tool for the job - not the one with the best backstory or license.

          If this were a tool for a group of friends for casual chitchat or games, then I might pick on other merits.

      • foresto 1250 days ago
        > Smart background replace with optional green screen support

        I find that one curious. Can you elaborate on it? I'm having trouble thinking of a situation that would make it a need. I don't particularly want people having a view into my home, but it's easy enough for me to sit in front of a wall/curtain, or just move personal objects out of view.

        The others are more interesting; thanks for the list.

        Allow me to add one relevant to certain communities: Audio suitable for musical collaboration. The music teachers, students, and performers I know prefer Zoom because it works better than the alternatives they have tried. I think it's a combination of tolerable latency and the ability to disable audio processing that's designed for speech but distorts live music.

        • theshrike79 1250 days ago
          I usually work in varied locations and rather not have the people I'm in call with see where I am. They don't need to know that I'm outside or in a cafe.

          The green screen support is mostly for my home office, I can hang a generic green sheet behind me and get perfect background replacement.

          • artichokes 1250 days ago
            Seeing that someone is trying to conceal their setting is 100x sketchier than being outside.
            • bloodorange 1250 days ago
              I'm not the person to whom you have replied but I'd say one could look at it from another perspective. I do not like the invasion of privacy from having others look into my home when I haven't invited them to do so. So, when I have a choice, I'll always remove or replace the background.
            • nvr219 1250 days ago
              I'm on Zoom calls for work about 10 hours a week and custom backgrounds are very popular. Personally my office is a complete mess and putting a custom background on is much easier than cleaning.
              • srtjstjsj 1250 days ago
                For the same reason, I use a custom foreground where possible.
            • jbc1 1250 days ago
              That's why the custom backgrounds is important. It normalises it. People can just think you're using one for fun.
      • tomjen3 1250 days ago
        I disagree with webinars being a necessary product for a Zoom competitor. It feels like a necessary feature for a different, only partially overlapping market. As I remember it, Zoom has Webinars as an optional paid extra on top of its professional accounts.

        Forcing mute (and ideally video off) on participants is a pretty easy feature to code for someone like Google and their google meet does seem to support 50+ users. It doesn't have green screen, but it does have background blur, which I would expect to be the same.

        • lou1306 1250 days ago
          > I disagree with webinars being a necessary product for a Zoom competitor

          Sorry for the bluntness, but this is like saying "pivot tables are not a necessary product for an Excel competitor". If you don't provide webinars features (panelists, Q&A, viewers on mute by default...) then you are not really a Zoom competitor, just the n+1th video chat service. I know these may look like trivial features, but having them out-of-the-box is what made Zoom a game changer.

          And I say that as someone that utterly despises Zoom, as recently most of my friends ended up being inexplicably locked out of the webinar where I was defending my PhD.

        • theshrike79 1250 days ago
          If the C-team need to give a virtual presentation for 1000+ employees, people forgetting to unmute their mics or allowing them to unmute without permission is a complete and total dealbreaker for a product.

          I know that these aren't complex features code-wise, other solutions just have decided not to implement them.

          • temp667 1250 days ago
            No kidding - blocking participant screen sharing, there is always someone who can't figure out how to un screen share.

            Space to speak works great as well

      • temp667 1250 days ago
        Ease of use - how is that not on the list. Zoom persists / pops up / works for everyone.

        Signal? Are folks serious here? This is ease of use to onboard a 50 person call with a click? When I last checked they didn't even have group video calling AT ALL.

        You realize why zoom is crushing it - people care a lot more about convenience then anything, and signal didn't even have group video calling.

        • leephillips 1249 days ago
          Not everyone. I can’t use it. Jit.si, Google meetings, and others work OK on my machine, but not Zoom.
      • ausjke 1250 days ago
        worked in video conference industry for a few years, those are not hard to implement at all.

        what Zoom gets is what its CEO once described: they always think from the perspective of users, instead of listening form the marketing dept. That is, Zoom put customer and usability first, the rest(including security...) second.

      • xtat 1247 days ago
        you need green screen support? always felt like a cosmetic thing to me
      • davisr 1250 days ago
        And Zoom is also absolutely corrupt malware. Obviously, you can be the judge for yourself, but I personally don't care if my malware has chromakey--it ain't ever getting close to my PC.

        https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech...

        The OS vendor needs to push fixes to uncorrupt people's PCs because Zoom installs a backdoor to spy on webcams? That's worse than terrible--that's criminal.

        https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...

        • ausjke 1250 days ago
          It could be either done intentionally with evil thoughts, or it's just a growth pain and areas/issues need to be fixed/improved whenever they occur. Note Zoom basically got a "lucky" home run by the COVID-19 scenario, that Zoom itself never expected to be used by so many so soon. I hope, Zoom will be improve in those weak areas quickly to erase concerns.

          But I hate the censorship part in the OP, there is no reason for them to do that ever.

    • john_moscow 1250 days ago
      There's a logistical problem with it. Most home Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth. I.e. your download speed is much faster than your upload speed, which works great for browsing and watching videos.

      However, if you want to have a meeting with N participants, the presenter's connection needs fit N independent outgoing video streams. Cloud-based services work around it by sending 1 outgoing stream to the server with a much better connection, that then forwards it to every other attendee.

      The trouble is, someone needs to pay for that server. And since most people want videoconferencing to be free, that server would be either run by an enthusiast that will bail out once the traffic becomes noticeable, or by someone with a political agenda.

    • allarm 1248 days ago
      I lost every time people compare apples and oranges. Do you realize that in case of Zoom and Webex their traffic goes via their global backbones with strict SLAs and in case of the other software it takes the Internet path (unless your company/you have their own backbone network)? The thing about Internet is that no one can guarantee you anything - bandwidth, loss, jitter and most importantly - latency. Today the quality is okayish and tomorrow it is crap - but you can’t do anything with that. That’s the thing you should keep in mind when you’re advising alternatives. Of course if you are using video conferencing to chat with your relatives from the same city (or country if your country is small enough) it will most likely be fine. Things change when you need to have multiple countries in a call.
    • spidersouris 1250 days ago
      I think most people would use alternatives to Zoom if they weren't obliged to use it because their university or their workplace have some kind of partnership with them.
      • vinay427 1250 days ago
        This is definitely not true for me or most anyone I talk to. In fact, I was incredibly glad when my university created an agreement with Zoom, and am now often the one asked to create the meeting when communicating with friends and family (including on FB Messenger which has video calling built-in) to use Zoom and avoid the Free plan limitations.
        • spidersouris 1249 days ago
          My point is: if you are against Zoom's policy, you can't really afford not to use it if your workplace is using it.
  • lmilcin 1250 days ago
    Just imagine the world where local bus operators will deny you access to public transport because the algorithm decided your movement pattern looks suspicious.

    Zoom is a utility to allow people to communicate. Denying ability to organize a webinar is akin to selectively denying people to meet on a plaza where there is no possible direct damage from the meeting (ie. no possiblity for disturbance to neighborhood, violence, etc.) and only possibility that law is broken by speech.

    • BurningFrog 1250 days ago
      Not that hard to imagine in a country with a No Fly List.

      https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-y...

    • oefrha 1250 days ago
      Maybe not from bus operators, but in this world, members of “a designated terror organization in the US” are certainly denied a lot of mobility. Good luck getting a U.S. visa wearing that badge.

      Background:

      > Leila Khaled is a Palestinian refugee and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

      > Khaled was one of the hijackers in the TWA Flight 840 hijacking in 1969, which was in of itself one of the four simultaneous Dawson's Field hijackings the following year as part of the campaign of Black September in Jordan. The first woman to hijack an airplane,[2] she was later released in a prisoner exchange for civilian hostages kidnapped by her fellow PFLP members.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled

      • godelski 1250 days ago
        I'm not going to lie, I'm not upset with someone hijacking 2 different airplanes being denied access to planes. The punishment seems to fit the crime.
        • bigbubba 1250 days ago
          I assume she's probably barred from entry by ship as well. But I share your apathy to her plight.
      • MattGaiser 1250 days ago
        I am fine with denying bus hijackers access to public transport too.
        • throw498754 1250 days ago
          The Hong Kong protestors destroyed multiple subway stations.

          Should all of them be denied access to public transport?

          • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
            Until they renounce violence, that seems fair. Is a subway station a military target?
            • 542354234235 1249 days ago
              > Until they renounce violence, that seems fair. Is a subway station a military target?

              So you are basically removing any ability for an oppressed minority to fight against a powerful government. The protesters should only go against military targets, you know like tanks, because we all know how that turns out.

  • bigphishy 1250 days ago
    While on a zoom call this morning, I ran a continuous TCPDUMp to see what servers were being contacted; the majority of the traffic was sent to 193.122.212.125

    Edit: This IP is hosted by Oracle https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud.

    Although zoom ostensibly has its headquarters in san jose, the code is developed 100% in mainland China. We should consider the face that the chinese military likely has access to MITM all zoom conversations on demand. I find the situation disquieting, but I am of two minds because I also feel almost the same level of distrust to facebook and whatsapp conversations.

    • hadcomplained 1250 days ago
      > the code is developed 100% in mainland China

      I am under the same impression and have some circumstantial evidence supporting it as someone who's been inspecting the code of the Zoom client (just for fun): their Windows client uses a 3rd party library that is used virtually only in China whose documentation is available only in Mandarin.

      On a tangential note, I got surprised to see no traces of attempts to make inspection harder on their client software. Even function names remain intact in some cases, which I assume would not happen if they had a malicious intent like embedding a backdoor.

      > We need to promote our own opensource and free tools to our friends and family, we will get the last laugh.

      Although I agree that there should be viable alternatives to available tools for online communication without the possibility of being eavesdropped, I can see why such things do not exist. It'd be too inconvenient for the law enforcement. And if you take things from the perspective of whether that thing makes the job of the law enforcement harder, you'd notice such things tend not to exist. As a principle, popular software should not have a means to prevent data going through the software from getting inspected by the law enforcement. Does Dropbox offer end-to-end encryption? Of course not. Is there a popular easy-to-use disk encryption software? There was TrueCrypt, which is gone for an obvious reason. Does Gmail implement end-to-end encryption for emails? Of course not...

      • samatman 1250 days ago
        > Even function names remain intact in some cases, which I assume would not happen if they had a malicious intent like embedding a backdoor.

        For what it's worth, this is a bad assumption.

        Someone hiding bad behavior from a reverse engineer wants it to be in friendlyMisnamedFunction, not in lkjwer23_aic. If you remove all the English semantics from the binary, a reverser is free to focus on the behavior; if you don't, you can lure them into a false sense of security.

        • srtjstjsj 1250 days ago
          Are any reverse engineers that stupid?
      • jrockway 1250 days ago
        I'm under this impression because the UI is full of grammatical errors that aren't the types that native English speakers make. I would be surprised if there's anyone in the US working on the Windows app.
      • redis_mlc 1250 days ago
        >> the code is developed 100% in mainland China

        > I am under the same impression and have some circumstantial evidence supporting it as someone who's been inspecting the code of the Zoom client

        This has been reported in the US press for years. The Zoom founder and the original 40 programmers worked for Cisco Webex, and the programmers were/are based in China.

        Why Cisco allowed an ex-manager to poach 40 engineers is beyond me. My guess is that Cisco's legal team advised that the founder would just retreat back to China, where there's no fair legal system.

        The question is if Zoom copied source code from Cisco, which I haven't seen addressed yet. It would actually be surprising if Chinese engineers did not copy, since that's done in every other situation.

    • X6S1x6Okd1st 1250 days ago
      Is there evidence that WhatsApp is MITMable?

      I assumed it's not because it claims to be E2E, when I checked the fingerprint of a contract it looked good and reports are that the taliban uses it for internal comms

      https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/world/asia/afghanistan-wh...

      • bigphishy 1250 days ago
        No there is no evidence that the encryption keys have been modified. If the fingerprints match, then messages are not being intercepted and cannot be with today's technology. However, the code is closed, perhaps it is only displaying a similar thumbprint, and hiding the real thumbprint from the user. As far as I know, the code to whatsapp is closed.
        • X6S1x6Okd1st 1250 days ago
          It's certainly closed source, but their E2E protocol is laid out in their white paper.

          You can determine if a given version of the app is conforming to the protocol or not at some point in time.

          After a short search I was able to find this attempt: https://www.delaat.net/rp/2018-2019/p25/report.pdf

          Which was inconclusive.

    • LogicX 1250 days ago
      The IPs are announced by oracle: https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125

      Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud.

      • delfinom 1250 days ago
        Yea oracle trying desperately to stay relevant has severely undercut everyone else on bandwidth costs. It'll be silly for video apps not to use them. Though the effect on oracle long term will be interesting.
        • GordonS 1250 days ago
          TBF, bandwidth costs on AWS and Azure are so ludicrously high that it wouldn't be difficult to undercut them on bandwidth.

          That said, I wouldn't touch an Oracle product with a very long bargepole, even if bandwidth was free.

      • bigphishy 1250 days ago
        I see now, thanks for helping me pinpoint this.
        • justicezyx 1250 days ago
          Yet, your original comments will be read and cut out of context.

          For precise communication, consider edit your original post.

    • throw498754 1250 days ago
      > the code is developed 100% in mainland China.

      Did the Keybase team move to China?

      • 3AC51854 1249 days ago
        Has the Keybase team written any code for the Zoom client?
  • aspenmayer 1250 days ago
    >“Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations and does not have any policy preventing users from criticizing Zoom,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Zoom does not monitor events and will only take action if we receive reports about possible violations of our Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Community Standards. Similar to the event held by San Francisco State University, we determined that this event was in violation of one or more of these policies and let the host know that they were not permitted to use Zoom for this particular event.”

    >However, Zoom did not respond to questions about which specific policy was violated or whether other events have been shut down by the company.

    • duxup 1250 days ago
      Zoom already globally banned users on behalf of China related to Tienanmen, and Zoom just said they had to do it.

      If that is still a thing I don't know what policy you can count on if there is always a "except when someone tells us to censor it" exception to everything.

      Granted there are always legal changeless and exceptions to everything, but if Zoom is at the mercy of a simple request from a non free state that there's no way to challenge or push back on ... what do any of those rules mean? How quickly can a topic go from ok to getting you banned?

      • criddell 1250 days ago
        > Zoom just said they had to do it

        Is that incorrect? What was their other option?

        • gpm 1250 days ago
          Exit china?
          • criddell 1250 days ago
            Why would they be allowed to exit China? The government has a stake AFAIK and so they have a say in the matter.

            If Google or Facebook received an order to take something down from the US government and they decided not to do it, Would leaving the US be a realistic option?

          • yorwba 1250 days ago
            Which country would give them a few thousand visas for their employees in China to exit together with their families?
            • gpm 1250 days ago
              They'd be extremely unlikely to be able to take their entire engineering team with them.

              That's an example of why doing business with this company is problematic, but it doesn't change the fact that that is the other option when China demands you censor something.

              • duxup 1249 days ago
                Agreed.

                The local engineers would obviously have all sorts of considerations if they really were defying the wishes of their local government.

  • ineedasername 1250 days ago
    If you believe there is inappropriate censorship by large tech platforms, this is still probably not the hill to die on over the issue. This is an unrepentant member of a terrorist group who advocates the use of violence as the means to resolve political & religious disputes. [0] Freedom of Speech generally doesn't acknowledge advocacy of violence as a covered by that freedom.

    [0] Some use words, some use arms and some use politics. Some use negotiations. I chose arms and I believe that taking up arms is one of the main tools to solve this conflict

    • srtjstjsj 1250 days ago
      In the US we build giant monuments to people who not only advocates but who engaged in the use of violence as the means to resolve political disputes. We also put them on our money and name cities and states after them.
    • 542354234235 1249 days ago
      > This is an unrepentant member of a terrorist group who advocates the use of violence as the means to resolve political & religious disputes.

      You might want to look up the violence against civilian targets that the government is using, which could be argued to be terroristic. We aren't exactly talking about someone using violence against someone else they disagree with. We are talking about about two groups using violence, one of which is vastly more powerful than the other.

    • nullc 1250 days ago
      This is San Francisco State University and New York University being censored.

      Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf? -- a book by a genocidal maniac?

      I think these events are making a good case that schools (and especially universities-- where people are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas) should not be using zoom.

      • ars 1250 days ago
        > Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf?

        If the speaker agreed with Mein Kampf, and was promoting it, I'd have a very hard time criticizing zoom over it.

        Free speech is important, but this speaker can find her own tools to promote her terroristic ideas, zoom has no obligation to help her.

        > are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas

        That's a very charitable interpretation. And if in fact this was a forum to discuss ideas, with pro's and con's, I might agree. But this is simply giving a platform to a terrorist, there is no intellectual discussion going on here.

        The way you wrote "discussing Mein Kampf", you are implying they would actually be discussing it. But that's not what's going on here.

        It's kind of like a reverse strawman - you changed the event into a much less controversial one, and then told people they should criticize zoom for blocking it. But zoom didn't block your strawman, they blocked an actual terrorist.

        • nullc 1250 days ago
          I don't know anything about the event but what was obvious in a glance at the parent article.

          How many orginizations should get a veto over events run by universities?

          Wouldn't you prefer to not run events using tools that have vetoed your decisions on appropriate materials and can be expected to do so in the future?

          • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
            The US government gets a veto over the acts of its foreign military enemies.

            I don't see this as a Zoom issue. Have any other US-operating companies hosted this person?

            • nullc 1249 days ago
              If this were an action by the US government it would end up in court on first amendment grounds extremely quickly.
      • ineedasername 1250 days ago
        No, it was the speaker being blocked. If it was merely a lecture on the topic of this person, their organization & actions, then I would share your belief that it was censorship rather than an acceptable limit on Free Speech.
  • yadco 1250 days ago
    She's an actual terrorist who threatened the lives of civilians, and part of an organisation that killed civilians.
    • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
      A leader of the organization.
  • peter303 1250 days ago
    A Stanford AI policy group called Human Centered AI wont use Zoom for its seminars due to political disagreements with Zooms founder. The result are embarrassing buggy online seminars from an institution supposed at the forefront of computing.

    Most of Stanford still uses Zoom however. In fact Eric Yuan was at an entrepreneur Stanford seminar last week.

  • stevefan1999 1250 days ago
    And this the reason Zoom "censored" it, is pretty funny: it happened so to be in a political fiasco of the middle east, in particular the struggle between Palestine and Israel.

    Now I'd just say this can be pretty sensitive because politics is like weapons going hot all the time, they might do collateral damages sometimes, so I think Zoom thought they did the right thing to prevent that: it just don't want to get into this geopolitical trouble. They didn't.

  • yalogin 1250 days ago
    Why is a known terrorist speaking at a university?

    Even more so of all entities zoom entering the picture and censoring the last thing I would expect to happen. Terrible thing for zoom to do. Why do they even know/read what’s going on?

  • diebeforei485 1249 days ago
    So let's say you're a university, and you want to host a controversial person. Let's say they are a white supremacist, militia type, or a terrorist or former terrorist, or whatever.

    You conduct a legal analysis and believe you're not breaking any laws by doing this, and are prepared to defend this in court if necessary.

    Large in-person gatherings are not an option in 2020, so is there a "decentralized" videochat platform that the university can use and host themselves, so that they bear the entire legal risk?

  • 4525235235 1250 days ago
    Zoom got where it is in large part through an aggressive native advertising campaign. For example, I don't watch Conan, but during the lockdown, even just walking past a room in my house where it was being watched, I would hear unnecessary mention after mention of Zoom:

    > https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conan+zoom

    Lest anyone thinks I'm being paranoid, he's been caught doing native ads before:

    > https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622660/some-game-companies-p...

    And his wasn't the only show doing this; other late night hosts would also make it a point to mention Zoom by name.

    In general, you should assume any conspicuous, unnecessary product references are native ads.

    • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
      What would Conan use for videoconferencing instead if Zoom didn't pay?
  • crb002 1250 days ago
    Another reason to use Jitsi.
  • Subsentient 1250 days ago
    "I do not fear death. When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist while I do?" -Epicurus
  • diebeforei485 1250 days ago
    I find it a bit weird that someone is banned from Zoom because of something they did 50 years ago.
    • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
      It's what she has been doing for 50 years consecutively. She is still an active member of the organization and has not repudiated their ongoing use of violence.
  • skc 1249 days ago
    I've said it before, but the only time I ever see positive posts about Zoom(or Slack) on HackerNews is whenever a Microsoft alternative is being discussed.

    Funny that.

  • nathanvanfleet 1250 days ago
    Streisand effect?
  • disown 1250 days ago
    It's interesting that the "news" site advocating for censorship all across youtube, facebook, google, etc is also shaming zoom for "censorship".
  • ribble 1250 days ago
    welcome to the land of communists and communist sympathizers
  • sb057 1250 days ago
    Is anybody going to post the "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" quote? How about that xkcd strip? Or a comment about how, as a private company, Zoom can allow or disallow whatever it wants on its platform?
    • akersten 1250 days ago
      In case this comment is in earnest and not flamebait: all of those things are true, and it is simultaneously true that we can advocate for private companies to not do this or to encourage people to use different platforms, without said position being hypocritical as the subtext of your comment implies.
      • srtjstjsj 1249 days ago
        Perhaps you should advocate to change the US law against foreign terrorists.
    • MisterBastahrd 1250 days ago
      Yes. If you have an issue with their policies, don't use them. They aren't remotely the only name in the game.