Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate, censorship

Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by cjbprime on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @07:33PM (#21265282)

> Asked, "Should Blizzard reverse its banning of the Hearthstone player?", only 36% of Blizzard employees surveyed responded Yes. However, a solid majority of 64% opposed the reversal.

I think this question misses the point a bit. Few people think there should be literally no punishment for disrupting a tournament stream with a political message. There is a rule against that, it's in the rulebook, you should probably get a warning and then a disqualification/ban.

People object because the punishments were extremely severe (clawing back already-won prize money, firing commentators who ostensibly had no idea this was about to happen to them), to the point of seeming like they were dictated to Blizzard by China.

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Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by tgsovlerkhgsel on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @09:37PM (#21266189)

> There is a rule against that

There is a vague and generic rule designed to let Blizzard slap people who make them look bad with penalties. Nothing like "no politics".

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Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by cjbprime on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @09:46PM (#21266239)

Fair enough, we could restate it, then: it would be generally unobjectionable to create and enforce a rule against disrupting tournament coverage with political speech.

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Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by Fnoord on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @06:58AM (#21269027)

All speech is related to politics though. There is no such thing as "apolitical speech".

As for the survey, it shows also something else: company loyalty.

Also, they called it Activision Blizzard; not Blizzard. So they included Activision employees in the survey?

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Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by tinco on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @08:49PM (#21265893)

Exactly, and because the Blizzard (and Riot) employees are far more exposed to this nuance because it is actually their colleagues making this argument of course their poll is going to reflect that.

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Re:Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate... by phire on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @08:57PM (#21265938)

The two questions seem designed to try and get a certain answer.

A better question would be: "Did Blizzard make a mistake with how they handled this sitatuion?"

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