Zoom closes account of U.S.-based Chinese activist after Tiananmen event

Zoom is a company I have loved so far, but a lot of this is starting to really rub me the wrong way and I really don't want to have to go find another solution.

However, without some sort of reversal, this is enough for me to deal with the mess of doing that.

Doesn't the Chinese government have transparency in their surveillance?

> Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in early June that the company has chosen not to encrypt free calls in order to cooperate with law enforcement.

This is incorrect. They don't offer end-to-end encryption, but it is encrypted between each client and the Zoom servers, and they have promised there's no way for a Zoom employee to spy on a conversation without visibly joining the meeting. https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1268061790954385408

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?

Always assume your calls on the public internet are being surveilled by all parties, no matter which service you're using.

But beside that... if they were surveilling them... why would they close them? Why would you shut down your intelligence source?

That's right, let's boycott Zoom!

>The government of Taiwan banned official use of Zoom due to security concerns, as have New York State schools, the U.S. Senate, and the German ministry of foreign affairs.

This is good enough reason to not use it.

Also I stopped using zoom and trying to avoiding it as much as possible after the very first vulnerability scandal[0] came about

[0] https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/zoom-zero-day-4-million-...

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?

Why does this event move the needle one way or another? The group had a paid account so Zoom knows who they are, and this was a publicized event. All the Chinese government needed to know was an event they don't like was happening, with the services of a company they can exercise soft power over.

In my workplace and from my perspective, I don't know how Zoom became trustworthy in the first place except through growth hacking and selling iPads with their software on it under the 'Zoom Rooms' name.

Besides that, why defend a company or a corporation in the first place? It's a damn shame that people are more enervated by corporate strife than by the suffering of our fellow beings.

If they have a workforce in China, there are 100% spies working there. Putting it another way, China would be foolish not to have spies working at Zoom, just like it would be foolish to not have spies working at Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. You should assume all of those companies have been infiltrated by the major countries of the world, or they are working with them. To believe otherwise would be extremely naive.

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?

It makes perfect sense to boycott Zoom based on their security issues, but does the presumption of innocence mean nothing anymore? It shouldn't be difficult to prove that Zoom is actively trying to block Chinese activists.

China banned Zoom during the trade war. Are you going to treat that as evidence that Zoom isn't colluding with the CCP? Why is Zoom not embracing end-to-end encryption to free users evidence that they are beholden to China, but Zoom committing to end-to-end encryption for paid users not evidence of the contrary? This type of circumstantial cherry picking is how conspiracy theories sprout.

Yep.. zoom is done.

> Is there any reason not to assume that the Chinese government is surveilling Zoom calls en masse?

The burden of proof lies on you to prove they are.

> surveilling Zoom calls en masse? Documenting participants (face, voice, language, location, etc.),

The first time I read that Zoom is the shell (in the USA) while the majority of work is being done in China, I thought the exact same thing. That China has everyone's face 3D scanned by now (multiple photos from multiple angles), everyone's voiceprint, everyone's IP, transcripts of what was said and by who...

Now they are trying to rebuild their shattered rep, while still handing anything and everything to their patrons.

> I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.

> its product development has been based in China, and that some Zoom calls were accidentally routed through Chinese servers.

Curious, did you background check every employee/contractor to make sure they are Chinese race free?

Did you do every byte of your network traffic audit to make sure they are not Chinese IP routable? How often do you update your firewall rules?

Because if you don't do either of these, if you run a successful company, someone will write an article to complain you have employed a Chinese developer and routed traffic to China.

> I feel like the good faith presumption for this company

When you place faith in a dictator, like the CCP, this is always the result:

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

I think Zoom is probably best used for hangouts-on-air type things, where you are literally publishing the contents of the call to the world in realtime anyway; for anything else it's off my list.

“I see people on HN defending Zoom all the time.”

I get the vibe with anything China related. Like it takes an over abundance of facts not to be attacked. Zoom fiasco is interesting though. I don’t do anything I don’t mind be monitored on there so sort of careless for now

You are oversimplifying the issue, in my opinion. Zoom has R&D office in China. If Chinese authorities come to Zoom with a violation of local law, Zoom has two options. First ignore the request and this means that the company is likely to be banned in China or comply with the request and get blowback in US. This issue is not unique to Zoom and each company makes its own decision. For instance, Google and Facebook fail to comply and are banned in China. But Apple does comply with Chinese laws and there are number of apps that are simply not available in China but are available in US. However, I wouldn't make a judgement that Google is good, but Apple is bad. Nor is this issue limited in China. Same thing applies to EU. EU has passed GDPR laws that all US companies have to comply with if they want to do business in EU. Again, some decided to comply with GDPR, others exited the market. Even in US this issue exists. When the government tells Google that they can't offer their services to Iran or sell to Huawei. Google chose to apply. You can try to make an argument that complying with US government orders is good, but complying with other government orders (EU, China, Brazil) is bad. This may work for you if you are an American, but the rest of the world knows about the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden and NSA. You could also make an argument that complying with any government is bad and the way PRISM is enabled by US tech is terrible. But if US companies start ignoring US laws, no matter how terrible they are, the only right thing to do is to shut the company down. It's called a rule of law. I am writing this not to say that Zoom is good or bad, but to prevent oversimplifying the issue or vilifying specific companies, countries or governments.

There is really no excuse for "accidentally" routing through Chinese servers for a service. To me the reasons are as shallow as Google's "error in algorithm".

Just recently YouTube "accidentally" deleted the account of a pro-democracy channel in Hong Kong with more than 600k subscribers [1]. Incidentally, this has never happened to pro-Chinese channels.

[1] (only sources in Chinese are available) - https://inews.hket.com/article/2664703/%E3%80%90YouTube%E5%B...

Our organisation has just reversed course on zoom and it is no longer our go to video conferencing tool.

I totally agree with you, there's a very high probability that the Chinese gov is recording everything.

But is that any better than being 100 % sure that the US gov is doing it?

I mean, what is the point of "the Chinese may be listening this is horrible!" when we know for a fact that the US are listening and most probably multiple european countries.

Nowadays, you must assume that whatever you do online is recorded by multiple states and may be used against you one day.

> recording content, etc.

Would it be technically feasible to record everything?

As much as I don't like consolidation of tech, I've had really good experiences with Google Meet. No scummy practices like forcing users to pretend that the app installer doesn't download just to connect from the browser either. What are Zoom's advantages?

Whoa. I didn't know that. Even though my trust of Zoom isn't completely eliminated (yet), that absolutely negates my reasons for using keybase.

Granted, I haven't used it in a while because they put me in a position where recovering my account is impossible.

Thank you for the idea, just deleted my keybase.io account.

Tesla canceled Zoom due to these privacy concerns expressed in this article. We use Microsoft Teams now and it's much better. Everyone already used it as an instant messenger before this and since it's part of the Outlook ecosystem i've found that it's much better. It's also saved a ton of useless meetings that run really long because i can just call someone straight through Teams instead of setting a meeting.

Wow, looks like I have been living under the rock for a little bit. The monetization strategy was not clear to me, but I though that eventually having premium accounts would make sense. The launch of Stellar was a little confusing.

They can do whatever they want as a private company. I can do whatever I want as well. Including leaving zoom. They should have the right to enforce whatever standards they want, and we have the right to disagree and leave.

At least you recognize your slippery slope fallacy when you make it!

> I wonder if we'll hear the "they're a private company, they can do what they want, it is only censorship if the government does it" routine.

Perhaps that applies, perhaps it doesn't. Did they remove the account due to pressure from the CCP?

Going after bigots on your platform does not equal going after activists. Please do not intentionally confuse the two.

i notice you say “certain kinds of speech” instead of speech promoting violence and racism.

im not aware of twitter et al banning any reasonable political activism.

I have to be internally consistent and agree that it's at Zoom's discretion as a private-sector company whether to host specific content or provide services to specific people and viewpoints, just as it is for Facebook/Twitter etc.

Two things are additional considerations that may change how this sort of action ends up for Zoom:

1. Zoom will be judged in the court of public opinion for their decision to align their moderation of access to their service with the CCP. This is likely a different degree of backlash than you'd see with, say, shutting down the accounts of US-based hate groups.

2. Zoom may come under scrutiny—without concrete evidence—for introspecting the content of communications through its platform that would otherwise be presumed to be private. This is different from Facebook/Twitter etc., for which much of the content that drives moderation decisions is public.

Zoom is not abridging anyone's constitutional right to free speech, nor would they be able to. How they are judged for their specific actions, though, is entirely at the discretion of their user base and public opinion.

>I wonder if we'll hear the "they're a private company, they can do what they want, it is only censorship if the government does it" routine.

The implication here is that they did it under pressure from the CCP, presumably because most (all?) of their programmers are from China. Blizzard got raked over the coals as well over a similar incident (search "blizzard blitzchung").

This xkcd comic didn't age well: https://xkcd.com/1357/. Liberals used to cheerfully link to this whenever a conservative was deplatformed. I don't think they'll trot out this xkcd anymore when their favored people are being censored.

It's not a violation of the free speech guarantees of the constitution, which is what people are usually discussing when that line comes out. I don't think what Zoom did should be illegal. That said...

There have recently been a whole lot of apologists saying "yes their founder is from China and their developers are in China but that doesn't make them a Chinese company". Fair enough, but when that company further starts intentionally enforcing Chinese law on US customers, I have no problem calling it a Chinese company. And I will not use a Chinese company's communication product unless forced to.

> The same people are now cheering when Facebook, Twitter, and the like shut down certain kinds of speech

How do you know they are the same people?

Is censoring hate speach really the same as censoring discussion of genocides? Really?

> it is only censorship if the government does it

Or if a government forces a private company to do it.

Are Zoom events like the one in the article public, such that any person who logs into Zoom can access as part of their interface, with out looking for it, the event in question?

Does the content of the event persist in a way that makes it easily sharable, with comments?

If the answer to both of these is “no,” I contend that the communications on these platforms is “private” and should be regulated by the US Government against censorship (though I have no hope that it will be). My reasoning is this:

(1) Zoom has no expectation that private communications will harm their business. In the same way Ma Bell never took responsibility for the zillions or drug deals and kidnappings that got coordinated over their system.

(2) Lack of viral potential means the possibility of inciting violence, cyber bullying, and other negative consequences of mass internet communication is diminished.

Both of these points have a correlating contention about censorship on Twitter, Facebook, etc: they (not the government) ought to censor content that has the potential for negative outcomes like those I mentioned. Is it difficult? Absolutely. Will there be disagreements? For sure. But, they can afford to figure it out, and our society can’t afford for them to not to.

NB: We need nuance and reasoning here. Falling back on first principles and calling it a day is not enough; those principles were articulated at a time where speech replication depended on industrial machines and were limited by how fast a pony could run. We’re talking the ability to beam information practically into every child’s brain 24/7 anywhere on the planet using psychological tricks to engage them.

Isn't the base argument is tolerance/inclusivity good, intolerance bad. (Intolerance like inciting violence, suppressing criticism, homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, the usual.) And simply taking steps that make make the world better according to this base argument is also good?

This of course can become slippery and slope-y eventually, if a propaganda machine takes over as the tolerance authority, but I don't think that's a real problem compared to what the other problems the argument is trying to address.

Yes, it seems like this was ultimately a bit of a nothingburger.

As much as we may not like it (and I certainly personally don't), China has the authority to censor the internet within its borders. Zoom literally has no choice but to follow China's law within China's borders, if it is to provide its product there at all.

Zoom accidentally deactivated a US-based account, and fixed it when they found out.

At worst, in this instance, they seem to simply be guilty of an administrative mistake and slow customer support.

It seems that this would imply that the Chinese government knew the contents of his call(s)?

Speculation: Chinese zoom users were required to switch to Chinese version of Zoom last September. There were probably mainland users using international version + VPN to participate in the event, probably some sort of local regulation that prevents users in CN from interacting with international meets, especially on no-no subjects. From 2nd link below:

>>Intensifying international tensions and the country’s upcoming 70th anniversary are cited as reasons for the block, according to Chinese media.

Some old articles:

Zoom suspends Chinese individuals users from hosting meetings due to ‘regulatory demand’ https://technode.com/2020/05/15/zoom-suspends-chinese-indivi...

China’s Zoom users switch to local version after blockage https://technode.com/2019/09/19/chinas-zoom-users-switch-to-...

China blocks US video-conferencing tool Zoom https://technode.com/2019/09/09/china-blocks-us-video-confer...

It's time for western companies to stop pretending it's possible to be economically successful in China whilst remaining true to their purported western values.

> Between the lines: This suggests Zoom closed the account due to concerns in China, which forbids free discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.

But why close the US rather than close the Chinese accounts?

How is that outrageous? US companies cow tow to CCP all the time, e.g. the NBA. If you're trying not to get blacklisted by the world's second largest market then it makes plenty of sense.

Here are more details shared by Humanitarian China with links to the video recordings and the photos of Zoom blockage.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12DM3ccTe70yzqCDPu9uXlCD7....

It looks like the account was reinstated: https://twitter.com/ZhouFengSuo/status/1270828746589769732?s...

My guess is that they were under pressure to close all the accounts in the meeting, backpedaled after the article, and reenabled the non-Chinese ones. Honestly, if they just did this to begin with, it'd be understandable? They just fucked up and blocked the non-China accounts too, triggering the China Watchers of which this reporter is a prime member of.

I ultimately see companies adopting the TikTok model, where Chinese users basically get their own sandboxed app and company structure subject to Chinese law that nobody else can communicate with.

>If Zoom, an American company, really did intentionally close the account of someone living in the US, because the Chinese government asked them to for political reasons, that does sound outrageous.

Most of their devs are from china.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/26/zoom-key-profit-driver-ahead...

>Zoom disclosed in its IPO prospectus last week that most of its product development personnel are based in China

Presumably they don't want to lose their pool of cheap programmers.

Zoom is a multinational company.

I generally share a smattering of links like these:

Zoom banned from New York City schools due to privacy and security flaws https://www.fastcompany.com/90486586/zoom-banned-from-new-yo...

Google Told Its Workers That They Can’t Use Zoom On Their Laptops Anymore https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/google-bans...

Elon Musk's SpaceX bans Zoom over privacy concerns https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spacex-zoom-video-commn/e...

Beware of ‘ZoomBombing:’ screensharing filth to video calls https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/17/zoombombing/

Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2020/03/27/zoom/

Zoom security issues: Here's everything that's gone wrong (so far https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes

Mass move to work from home in coronavirus crisis creates opening for hackers: cyber experts https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-cyber/...

Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/security_and_...

‘Zoom is malware’: why experts worry about the video conferencing platform https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech...

Ex-NSA hacker drops new zero-day doom for Zoom https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-nsa-hacker-drops-zero-1400...

Maybe we shouldn’t use Zoom after all https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/31/zoom-at-your-own-risk/

Attackers can use Zoom to steal users’ Windows credentials with no warning https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/unpat...

The Zoom Privacy Backlash Is Only Getting Started https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-backlash-zero-days/

Hackers Are Selling a Critical Zoom Zero-Day Exploit for $500,000 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdqgv/hackers-selling-cr...

Researchers found and bought more than 500,000 Zoom passwords on the dark web for less than a cent each https://www.businessinsider.com/500000-zoom-accounts-sale-da...

I refuse to use Zoom at all.

If it's a client I have a comfortable relationship with, I'll tell them honestly why I won't use it.

If not, I tell them "I can never get Zoom to work on my computer" or something similar, and provide an alternative.

I will not use it. Have used it once with some friends when it seemed churlish not to, but have refused to and suggested using Jitsi Meet since then with others including at work.

Work insists on Microsoft Teams now. Oh well. At least I am only probably being spied on by the "good guys" now, right?

I don't use it because development team is based in China.

You don’t need to install it to join a zoom meeting, that’s one of the reasons it’s so popular.

Just say "our company policy does not allow using Zoom due to security concerns", then suggest an alternative that you prefer.

But what this means is that someone from Chinese government gives a call to to MS or LinkedIn management and ask for these things, suggesting that any other option would result in less purchases of their office licenses and etc.

But, in a way, that's not news. It's not like anyone suspected MS of being trustworthy.

There is a vast difference between letting the government suppress speech, which is what China does, and letting private companies suppress speech, which is what happens in America.

When the government does it, you can't express that idea anywhere. When private companies do it, you can still express those ideas somewhere else.

> the same behavior for "sensitive topics" back home

I'm not aware of any government action regarding speech and sensitive topics like we see in China, or other dramatically less free countries.

>It is ironic how the western public

Only part of the US public, to be fair.

That said, the US public does certainly seem to be mostly apathetic about the giant US government surveillance system, even though that system, if the right sort of political will appeared, could be rapidly turned into a system of social control rivaling what China has.

It isn't, because you are wrong. Do not compare (I assume) the warnings around Trump's lies to be comparable to blocking human rights activists from a platform outright.

I don't know if "ironic" is quite the right word there; I'd go with "hypocritical" or "completely expected".

Seriously. Just a week ago, Facebook employees went on strike because FB refused to censor Trump’s messaging. NYT reporters forced the opinion editor to resign for allowing a Republican senator to publish an op-ed. Meanwhile, I’ll bet many of those same people consider censorship of Tiananmen Square to be wrong.

Apparently, there is good censorship, and bad censorship. What’s frustrating is that the proponents of “good censorship” do not even realize this irony, or at least they call it a false equivalence when you point it out to them.

To address that “false equivalence” criticism, I would be curious to hear from someone who thinks Facebook or Twitter should annotate Trump’s posts. Do you also think that they should annotate posts about Tiananmen square to include links to the Chinese government’s narrative that actually, there was no massacre and it was a CIA-instigated riot?

Who decides which posts to annotate and what to annotate them with? It’s not just the CCP who believes the Tiananmen square massacre didn’t happen; there are millions of Chinese citizens who agree with them, just like there are millions of Americans who disagree with Trump. So is there a difference between a mob of Americans asking to annotate a Trump post about a BLM protest with a CNN article, and a mob of Chinese people asking to annotate an Ai Weiwei post about Tiananmen Square with a People’s Daily article?

> Only last week, it was announced by Zoom's CEO that free accounts are unencrypted, to enable law enforcement agencies.

I missed that one, do you have a source?

The E2E encryption hasn't been released yet. Currently and in the future, according to their announcement, all calls will at least be server-client encrypted. Paid ones will apparently be optionally E2E encrypted.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21279355/zoom-end-encrypti...

Furthermore, if they make an excuse after this story blows up, I think it's reasonable to consider their justification "retconned" and not actually the real reason they closed the account (which can be reasonably inferred to be CCP-aligned censorship).

Maybe the journalist forgot to email them a meeting ID.

A similar silence occurred when Marriott fired the guy over the tweet about Tibet. In fact, they were forced to apologize [0]. I kinda hope Zoom is forced to apologize by China as well to at least clarify the type of company they are.

0 - https://twitter.com/MarriottBonvoy/status/951344031405084673

eh they probably just can't be bothered. how many other accounts have they closed? what other normal company things is the company doing on a day to day basis, journalists can't expect to circumvent the whole company calendar for something they latched on to as controversial.

this is a misaligned expectation from the journalists and everyone swayed by what the media, and thats true without making any opinion on the particular issue at hand

you have to assume this is going to harm the company for their lack of defensive response to mean anything. but maybe they are still converting customers into paying ones, maybe there is still enough liquidity for a secondary offering, maybe there are partnerships in the works that are more important and lucrative that don't care about the media frenzy

Problems usually go away if you ignore them for long enough.

This is a bit of a rabbit hole but my misunderstanding in the early days of the internet was HOW people might choose to relate to one another via the internet, and I dramatically underestimated the amount of negative interactions there would be...

Tech itself was always a yin and yang to me.

That's why I keep calling for a NEW Internet to be created based on HORNET technology. HORNET is basically the same as the Tor network, but with speeds similar to the current internet.

Sites can't be traced or blocked and neither can its users. There will be free speech, along with all its excesses (terrorism, child porn, illegal content sharing etc.).

If everyone migrates towards the HORNET internet authoritarian regimes will either have the choice to block the entire internet (causing massive economic damage) or allowing free speech.

Well, this presumes that it's a government acting in good faith. Sure, something like the UK or a EU country should have dissent and criticism to keep democracy healthy. However, countries like China, Russia, and NK, have no interest in fostering a healthy dialogue and it wouldn't be very conducive to their government's interests.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

-Martin Luther King Jr.

This observation seems more immediate these days internationally than ever.

The problem for China is that Xi Jinping has essentially installed himself as dictator-for-life. He now rides to and fro on a tiger from which he dare not dismount.

The CCP witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and instead of opening up to a peaceful transition to democracy they chose to double down on top-down authoritarian policies. At the same time, they’ve sought to leverage markets for economic growth. The result is a conundrum: how to reconcile Marxist ideology with the prosperity of markets?

This is where “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” comes in. This is an ideology of doublethink which can only be maintained through force. All of the censorship taking place, both inside and outside China, has the goal of ideological suppression for any speech the CPC deems a threat. And so here we are.

Communists don't think that political dialogue exists as a genuine process between rational actors. They think that people's political beliefs are a product of their environment and class. This is why they don't like free speech and don't like debates. They think that schools are only capable of indoctrination. Therefore they seek to turn this indoctrination in favor of the workers rather than the bourgeoisie.

Edit: if you disagree, please explain why. Marx believed that history moved according to dialectical materialism where almost all individuals are little more than atoms in a moving body.

You're not considering the real and terrifying strengths that dictatorship has over democracy. In true democracies the politicians never undertake a plan that lasts longer than one election term because they have no incentive to do so. In China they feel free to undertake 20 year plans with large upfront investments because the party does not care about winning an election every 2-4 years. Why do you automatically assume that elections provide a reality check? Would you say that the Democrats and Republicans in the USA are tightly coupled to reality given their frequent elections? On the contrary I believe that elections merely tie legislative actions towards what voters perceive as electable. It doesn't matter what the PATRIOT act does as long as a political ad can sell the idea of "safety" to you. Politics in democracies have devolved to little more than entertainment.

On the other hand, China has achieved something very close to a technocracy where rules are based on expert opinion. The economy is controlled by economists, health policy is controlled by epidemiologists, and media censorship is controlled by political and social scientists. You are more likely to advance based on competence in Chinese politics than you are in the USA, where elections are just a high school popularity contest. The Chinese government has plenty of terrifyingly competent bureaucrats.

Try Google Meet. Different can of privacy worms, but at least they aren't connected so directly to China.

Blizzard

I don't understand this reasoning; the leverage is that China will ban the entire company from doing business in China, how would this law help anything?

I also don't think US laws applies in China, so if a company wants to do business in China, it has to follow Chinese regulations. Just like a company doing business in the US having the follow US regulations.

Perth Tolle who runs the FRDM ETF also had her account knocked offline. She is a human rights advocate who has been outspoken about the HK situation. It’s looking pretty bad for Zoom.

Google meet

No solution is able to perform very well on mobile browsers. Meet is great for desktop browsers, on mobile apps are available for Google Meet.

well, we'll quickly see if this was an accident. So far it doesn't look that way.

> Zoom happens to have a Chinese CEO.

You are understating the nature of Zoom's relationship to China.

This matters to me and might be enough to get me to switch away (as a former zoom defender). On the other hand, for the average person using Zoom for video calling their families, or for companies forced into WFH that finally set up a Zoom subscription and would have to go through self-imposed bureaucratic hell to swap platforms? I think the usability of the platform and simple convenience far outweighs any desire to switch right now. I wonder how sticky their consumer base actually is.

The UX is actually not that good. The layout is bad, features are hidden all over the place. It’s not logical or intuitive. It does have a lot of features though, I think that is what people like.

I mostly agree with what you are trying to say, but being snarky is against the hn guidelines. Edit: “against” is too strong a word - it isn’t a hard rule but I often see the hn community react negatively to sarcasm and snarkiness even though the content may be worthwhile.

No. Zoom should be banned and its CEO ousted.

The company should be purged from all Chinese influences.

If the alternatives were that better why will a chinese activist not use them?

Zoom is simply easy to use. I have tried all... Use Teams and SFB at work

I feel I should be careful believing this until I see a source reference of some kind.

In response to this specific event, or as a general bonus? I would love to hear any more details you can share.

how many US employees? any way of knowing?

Might want to put the edit at the top of your message for people skimming through...

Not all governments are equal. Cut out this whaddaboutism.

Edit: When I replied, OP was simply “governments monitor all major companies... including the US government”

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481161.

Plenty of companies elsewhere seem perfectly happy to do likewise. Offered as neither a defense of Zoom nor the CCP, but as calling out a tired strawman argument.

Don't you see the difference between state-sponsored outlets like RT and the individual activists Zoom banned?

Yea. "Youtube is a son of a b, but he's our son of a b"

The thing is, it's much simpler for you and the person your talking to to switch from Zoom to SomeOtherApp. But with Youtube - you can take your own videos off of it, but you can't take the ones you want to watch off.

Ultimately it boils down to a value judgment.

RT and Sputnik spread misinformation and have coordinated efforts to influence another country's elections.

The activist in question was providing a forum for people affected by the Tiananmen massacre to memorialize their loved ones and ensure people remember what happened.

I'm fine with the first ban, but not the second, and I don't think it's at all weird or hypocritical to hold that position. "Spreading lies with the goal of sowing geopolitical discord" is not the same as "memorializing a historical event that China would rather sweep under the rug".

(And before you say "but the US influences elections all the time", yes, I agree that the US does do that, and I wish it wouldn't, but that's not material to this particular discussion.)

Might be required for enforcement against illegal activity, either by law or by desire to avoid ending up as one of those platforms that endorses pure freedom of speech and ends up being labeled by society as a haven of crime and extremism. Would be hard to keep control of that without centralized control.

Please stop breaking the site guidelines. Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome here. Insinuations of brigading and other abuses are not ok (because the vast majority of the time, people are simply making them up to explain something they noticed and disliked). Going on about downvotes is also against the rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, I agree. It seems each Chinese company has a secret relationship with the Chinese government. But what they didn't notice is that the American embassy would censor your social account and content when you apply for Visa. American is the biggest surveillance country but takes it for granted.