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Comment by HALtheWise | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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US companies may enforce US law but they're not hiding the fact that they're US companies. Zoom claimed not to be a Chinese company while enforcing Chinese law for US users.

Yeah, but this is the mistake they’re acknowledging with a promise to build out the system to only suppress the mainland China citizens specifically.

My point is that this is not acceptable either.

It's not really a "mistake". They were aware they lacked functionality to region block meetings and rather than reply to the Chinese government that such a request will not be possible to comply with for x days until feature is developed, they opted to suppress US users. That sets a bad precedent for future ambiguous issues.

>Yeah, but this is the mistake they’re acknowledging

Out of interest, did they fix their "mistake" and reinstate the accounts?

Great question. Will show where they land.

Still waiting to see if China will show NBA games while Daryl Morey remains unfired.

https://qz.com/1730643/china-asked-nba-to-fire-daryl-morey-f...

How long is the west going to pretend it doesn’t see where this pattern of bullying ends...

Afaik, they have reinstated the accounts

To some extent there is a per-country copyright block. There are some videos not available in the US but available other places because of copyright claims. It probably has to do with who the copyright holder is.

Is the Youtube entity dealing with EU users a US company ? Aren’t they based in Ireland for all business and legal purposes for these users ?

US copyright is enforceable overseas due to trade agreements. As a US citizen do you think you can infringe EU's copyright law?

It is true that US's culture has spilled into the terms of use of some of these services. I still remember the "napalm girl" being censored on Facebook for public display of nudity.

However these aren't examples of individuals being targeted by the US government.

Also just because there are instances of other companies having a negative impact on foreign users, it doesn't make this particular instance any less bad. It's a logical fallacy to imply otherwise.

Fuck Zoom. Fuck the Chinese administration.

There, now go say that in China without fearing for your life or that of your loved ones.

There are plenty of countries that US copyright law is enforced on a US company's platform even though there are NO trade agreements with the US with respect to copyright. Otherwise, piracy would be allowed to be hosted in numerous countries.

It's a blatant double standard.

Such as?

These trade agreements are global. The countries that don't have trade agreements are usually those suffering through an embargo.

Beautiful use of strong language.

Not exactly, because if you are based in a certain country, you must follow their laws regardless of where the user is.

Plus obeying local laws in regards to local residents, which don’t apply to this allegation.

So, by this logic, Zoom’s actions only make sense if they are based in China.

Zoom can choose to ban / block whoever they want for whatever reason they want.

Can’t they? They’re not required to do business with any particular individual by statute, are they?

I think the above discussion is about whether they have to, not whether they can. Zoom can ban all of their users if they want to, but presumably they only will do so if pressured, because businesses want users and also suspending accounts is bad press. By the way, you're also allowed to be outraged by what a business does even when that business is acting within its rights.

I get the feeling there is no bad press in this context.

Zoom gets lots of free press exposure and gets to point out how they are improving.

I didn’t really care until now - and I won’t use zoom for any more personal conversations and am about to email my employer to move away from Zoom for this reason. So yes bad press?

Only if their daily / weekly / monthly active users decreases

Nope! As a US company though of course they're not allowed to refuse to do business with someone based on gender, religion, or ethnicity though.

However it's still unethical.

Where you can see this most clearly is nudity. Traditionally europe had a more liberal approach when it came to nudity — that was until US platforms came in with their prude nipple policing.

Not Twitter!

Nor reddit by the way!

I think platforms are OK to publish this as long as it's behind an "NSFW" wall/toggle. But platforms like Facebook choose not to have one (not to mention that the policy of real names isn't really compatible with posting NSFW content)

I'm okay with double standards that are because we need to treat freedom and democracy differently to the threat that tyranny is.

> For example, I don't think that YouTube will allow you to post a blatantly copyright-infringing video, even if your account declares a country that doesn't enforce US copyright laws

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the data held to US law if it's stored in the US? I'm pretty sure the federal government wouldn't take kindly to me storing petabytes of copyrighted works in the US, regardless of whether my clients are in Chicago, South Africa, or Taiwan.

Zoom's datacenters are theoretically in the US, therefore the regulations US consumers should be held to are US regulations. If they want to play the "we follow local laws" card, they could have restricted the meeting in China only.

For the record, I think what the CCP is doing here is reprehensible, but I'm just trying to add my perspective on this specific issue.

It's definitely a US law applies everywhere thing for US based companies.

Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft apply DMCA takedown requests to servers hosted physically outside of the US.

Googles Servers aren't exclusively located in the US.

This double standard is an excellent point.

For example, US companies have no problem enforcing US copyright law in countries that have no such laws or trade agreements with the US. Otherwise, piracy would be allowed on sites like YouTube as long as the uploader was from one of these countries. Yet, US laws of free speech no longer seem to matter if the user is in an oppressive country.

The selective enforcement of US law to non-US users is a terrible double standard that needs to change.

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

You want to talk copyright and IP violations with the context putting China as the victim? That’s... actually laughable.

At some point the US will wake up as a nation and realize this is a new kind of war. Why suddenly is there a lot of pro chinese statements around the internet where there was none before?

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

And that’s perfectly fine.

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

I think it is fair to say that the laws in the US are objectively better than in China. The US does not put hundreds of thousands of people in camps because of their religion, or heavily censor the internet, or kill hundreds or thousands of civilians to suppress pro-democracy protests.

You’re on shaky ground there.

The US does imprison more of its citizens on a per capita basis than any other comparable nation.

The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.

I’ll stop there.

> The USA suffers from some of what it accuses the PRC - it is still not the PRC.

> The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.

Agreed. I think one difference being that Citizens can, with great personal peril to their own safety and well being, use the Right to assemble and protest to effect change to address systemic corruption.

As an activist with a background in protests in various demos myself, I just wonder what the World would have looked like if this had happened in 2008. There have been countless examples of senseless, illegal police brutality and murder during that time. I'm no fan of the movement but Occupy members were tazed, beaten, sprayed on a regular basis; and most of them were middle class white US Citizens.

The Legal system has not been a viable option for most to find redress to these ills, let alone justice, so they make taking to the streets the only option.

In the PRC doing that means you will be disspeared, and it can cost you your life if you speak out as seen with Li Wenlian, who's wife just had their child:

https://tucson.com/news/world/widow-of-chinese-whistleblower...

And the USA did allow violence against democratic organizers last week.

But those same organizers weren't shipped to Guantanamo for indefinite periods of time for "reeducation."

The USA suffers from some of what it accuses the PRC - it is still not the PRC.

> weren't shipped to Guantanamo for indefinite periods of time for "reeducation."

But Ramsey Orta essentially was.

The difference in the USA is solely one of pervasiveness, focus, intensity, not any particular outcome.

Nobody is going to disagree that the US treats its citizens better, but we're talking about country's foreign influence here. China doesn't cripple the economy or bomb other countries they disagree with.

Do they not? They certainly were willing to outright invade a sovereign nation of mostly peaceful monks (Tibet) with ground forces, then claim the territory as its own, something I don't think the USA has done since Puerto Rico (the expansionism specifically).

They also challenge the sovereignty of Taiwan regularly - it was China who refused to allow two sovereign nations of Chinese origin when the UN switched the Chinese seat to the PRC.

Different countries different tools. The PRC has only really come into its element in the last 3 decades. The USA's foreign policy advocates-through-violence (CIA) don't have the best track record for success but they do have 80 years of experience. Give China time and I expect they'll start doing the same.

China's invasion of Tibet was just a battle between two warlords, much like those that occurred before it. China didn't start terrorizing peaceful monks until the Cultural Revolution, well after China incorporated Tibet.

> Give China time and I expect they'll start doing the same.

Fair enough, but I hope the US and China incentivize each other to not impose their will on the rest of the world.

> China doesn't cripple the economy or bomb other countries they disagree with.

Is that a bad thing if we're trying to promulgate our values?

Yes it is, no matter how good you think your values are the end never justifies the means

Societies which promulgate their values by murdering innocent people don't last long. Certainly you can see some fairly decent examples on the History Channel ...

I mean from the CCP's perspective, China is promulgating their values to the Uyghurs.

This. As outraged as I have been by America’s actions towards their protestors it’s honestly a lot different then HK let along tiananmen square (which my iPhone refuses to recognize.. well that’s fucked up yet expected I guess, and least Taiwan and 🇹🇼 Are there)

Trump is doing trump but a lot of politicians and others have spoken out and marched - would that happen in China?

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

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

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

Indeed, it’s a major tourism draw in Beijing, why would it be censored?

As long as the Americans can publicly point out that their leader is a bit fat without expecting to be punished they can point out the suppressing free speech is wrong.

To be a moral beacon here America doesn’t have to be perfect.

They just have to be able to say that their hypothetical leader is doing a bad job and that he should be replaced ...or not of they want to.

From that all else follows.

Your argument falls flat as soon as Americans start protesting the innocent lives lost in America's illegal wars - at this point, American censorship and attacks on independent thought match those of the PRC, even exceeding their capabilities in some cases (Assange, etc.)

If you honestly believe that laws in China aren't worse than US law, then I don't know what to tell you...

I think that most people can obviously see who has the worse laws, regarding things like censorship.

> You’re on shaky ground there.

Would you accept prison or murder as counter-argument to this or other opinions of yours? If not, you prefer free speech.

> The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.

Who billed it thusly? In my books, the US or other nations don't determine the value of free speech, their respect for free speech determines their value.

I agree that this is better to have no arrest for crime thought, no censorship, and no (government covered mass) murder.

It doesn't mean that we are objective on this regard. On the contrary, at least for me, it comes from the subjective feeling that as I dislike the sentiment of being oppressed and I do feel empathy for other people, I wish them not to be oppressed either. This is all subjectivly grounded, and it's fine - to my mind at least.

Let's not pretend that something is objective just because it's deeply rooted into the best part of our hearts.

> The US does not put hundreds of thousands of people in camps because of their religion,

I have to say that China did a lot of things wrong but it couldn't care any less about religion. Most of the issues aren't religion related. It only makes matters more opaque and hide real issues. Hence I disagree with debates/discussions based on perceived perspectives and use these labels such as 'attack on religion'.

It's about control. The CCP sees religion as a threat because it challenges the party's atheistic view. The underlying issue is the rejection of a pluralistic society which religion is a part of it as well as language, way of life, etc...

https://nypost.com/2020/02/01/how-chinas-xi-jinping-destroye...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#Re-education...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Tibetan_unrest

Don't get me wrong, of course I knew it's about regional control. But even the wiki entry acknowledges that religious freedom is different in different regions of China. Other regions don't have any restriction at all. Hence my point that accusing China for religious repression is missing the point. It doesn't justify its actions but the issues are more deeply geopolitical.

If you have empathy then you should care about religious people regardless of your personal beliefs. How can you stand there and ask for equality for all then say something like you don’t care for a group of people? This is not equality.

It is very hard to objectively judge laws specifically and political systems in general. The only way to do so is to look at their outcome, but with the large amount of variables, and the time it takes to draw conclusions, objective facts about them are hard to make.

The world in general has concluded that planned economies (communism) is strongly inferior to market economies, but during the early days of communism it was not so obvious. Even in modern times there are people that argue communism was implemented prematurely and would be able to thrive during "end-stage capitalism". You also have plenty of people who while disagreeing with a complete communist revolution would still support nationalisation of key companies or even the more radical "workers being in control of the means of production".

Free speech is even less clear. With america winning the cold war there was a recognition of the american way including the strong support of freedom of speech being the superior system. However lately, especially after 2016 the west seems to have lost confidence in the absolute freedom of speech. Challenging the supremacy of the freedom of speech is the idea that citizens are not capable of judging speech on it's own merit and "misinformation" "speech glorifying violence" etc should be banned. It's not really a clear cut issue, you can for example argue that limiting free speech leads to a more harmonious society (the position taken by China, and also lately the reason given by New Zealand for their decision to ban the Christchurch manifesto)

> It is very hard to objectively judge laws specifically and political systems in general.

It’s not as hard as you might think. For instance, when the British East India company came into India, they banned the practice of Sati, revenge killings, etc. It really boils down to what version of history you subscribe to. Do you believe in the principles of the Enlightenment or not? If you do, then you’ll realize that colonization is actually a net positive for the world. Some cultures need to be told how to behave. Not all cultures progress equally or linearly.

I don’t think you can say it’s objectively better. Whether you think they’re better or not depends on your values.

Call it whatever you want, I'll take the imperialist country that doesn't censor activists' accounts.

I too have forgotten about Snowden and Manning, the latter of which has undergone extensive psychological torture at the hands of the US military government.

Snowden and Manning were perfectly free to engage in political activism without leaking classified information. Leaking classified information didn't amount to anything good.

And which country would that be?

Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc.

Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.

> And which country would that be?

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

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

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

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

Saying "many" conservatives get censored in the west is inaccurate, considering the most popular cable news channel in America is proudly conservative, as are many local news outlets and some of the top national newspapers.

In addition, the few people and organizations that have been deplatformed from social media and other hosting solutions in the west have had that fate befall them due to companies making a decision that it is not in their financial interest to allow that type of content on their platforms, given its unpopularity among other customers.

This is a completely different situation to China, where companies are directed by the government to explicitly censor certain types of content, and individuals are routinely arrested and imprisoned for creating or sharing content that the government does not agree with.

In China, political dissenters are "de-platformed" (what a nice weasel word for "censored") by companies as instructed by the government; in America, they are censored by companies as instructed by angry mobs. It doesn't make as much a difference as you think.

I live in China. It makes a very big difference.

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

Please, it does a disservice to those who are actually experiencing real oppression at the hands of an authoritarian government to make this comparison. Here is just one list of people who have been imprisoned in China largely for expressing themselves online: https://www.chinesepen.org/english/category/writers-in-priso...

Meanwhile, the "many conservatives" who you suggest have been censored in the west are still free to broadcast their content to anyone who wants to listen.

You moved the goalpost from censorship to prison.

We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China.

As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear who has most power. You can hide behind technicalities like them being private companies or whatever (I note that this argument does not hold when a small mom and pop company refuses to bake a cake, but apparently much larger companies can do whatever they want), but it just means that those companies have the power to censor speech _in practice_ (which is what actually matters in the end), and at the moment they're following angry mobs and not elected officials to define those censorship policies.

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

It's no cop out - businesses don't hold a monopoly on violence. They can't summarily remove the right of travel and speech (by jailing someone).

A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.

A whistleblower being disappeared or psychologically tortured is perhaps a fairer comparison to what goes on under Freedom & Democracy.

ahem Julian Assange cough

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

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

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

Oh my bad, I mistook that for Edward Snowden.

So what? If you don't think your country is implementing the best ideas out there--what the hell are you doing?

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

The practice of those ideas is imperialism.

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