All the same, it's good they took responsibility when they did. I don't use Slack at work at present, but being an emigrant worker myself (not iranian, but honestly it shouldn't really matter), the past week's events left enough of an impression on me that I would have likely strongly protested any attempts in my organization at getting a slack channel going. This response is at least well-written enough that it gives me pause, that I should research the company's track record more carefully before jumping to judgment. (they're still on thin ice as far as I'm concerned, but it's a step in the right direction)

My Twitter is full of academics with students and collaborators from all over the world that are complaining that Slack just eliminated their ability for them to communicate over the service. I'm not sure how many of them were free or paid though.

Being involuntarily prevented from using a service is rather the opposite of boycotting, I think. (In the sense that boycotts are a tool of applying economic pressure to convince someone to change their mind, and if you're being kicked off you aren't actually able to exert any pressure.)

It isn't those that got kicked off that are boycotting. It is those that had students or collaborators get kicked off, that are now refusing to use Slack.

You can block users now? At megacorp we definitely couldn't, and as much as there were people I wanted to block and mandatory channels I didn't want to be in… all of the frigging the bots were the most unbearable.

Sorry, I was unclear. You can't block people on either the free or paid plans, because you're supposed to ask your HR department to ask people to behave, and if you don't have an HR department you're 100% not their target audience. I've complained about this to Slack multiple times before, see their responses about how as a tool built for work they can't implement a block feature: https://twitter.com/geofft/status/767857284827475968 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/770000987016818688 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/818517767607517184 https://twitter.com/geofft/status/1017193464415576065

Yeah I've seen that response too. While at megacorp I just stayed off of slack as much as possible.