Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada

Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by panic on Thursday December 20, 2018 @09:47AM (#18725300)

A lot of racism and ethnic profiling is exactly like this -- actions that are individually justifiable, but somehow end up focusing on a particular race or ethnicity despite everyone "not meaning it that way".

Focusing on intent can help us feel better about ourselves when we unintentionally contribute to these problems, but if we actually want to fix them, we can't focus only on the intentional racism or intentional ethnic profiling. We have to understand and find ways to avoid the unintentional stuff too.

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Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada by yamazaki on Thursday December 20, 2018 @12:44PM (#18727110)

Slack doesn't even know their users race, ethnicity, or country AFAIK, thus they can't discriminate on that basis. I think this is just a badly handled case of abiding by the US embargo law. They seem to be disabling people who created their accounts from embargoed countries, probably checking by IP, which is inexact and bound to yield false positives

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