Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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...

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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."

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>strong man Randy Savage

macho man Randy Savage

I have made a grave mistake and I apologize to Macho Man Randy Savage and the entire Macho Man community.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

In that case, why is Zoom's censoring a problem at all?

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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/

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?

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

Yes, that's national sovereignty.

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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

I have found Jitsi meet to be not only a suitable replacement, but for video streaming quality, superior.

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.

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.

> 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?

Yes, I'm seeing about 1/2 zoom non-work meetings among friends when scheduling remote birthday parties or shared events - they got free training at work and feel comfortable using it. What a win for Zoom.

yes. For example, my wife hosts a weekly videochat with our friends.

That’s fair.

I’ve assumed thus far that using it socially was more zeitgeist than substance, only to pass like the sourdough starter phase.

Among my friend group it’s hard to find a reason to use it over, say, ad hoc FaceTime calls. But I recognize that’s not a position everyone is in or wants to be in. And preferences vary.

You're in an extreme filter bubble. FaceTime doesn't work on Android, PC, Linux, or Chromebook.

Close to 50%[1][2][3] of smartphones in the US are Apple. A "bubble," perhaps, but nothing extreme about it.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-... [2]: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh... [3]: https://blog.technavio.com/blog/iphone-market-share

> 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...

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.

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....

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.

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.

"paternal approach" is the most ridiculously white washed term I've heard used for the CCP's historical information practices... ever.

their paternal approach covers much more than censoring strife.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com