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.
My point is that this is not acceptable either.
Out of interest, did they fix their "mistake" and reinstate the accounts?
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...
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.
It's a blatant double standard.
These trade agreements are global. The countries that don't have trade agreements are usually those suffering through an embargo.
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.
Can’t they? They’re not required to do business with any particular individual by statute, are they?
Zoom gets lots of free press exposure and gets to point out how they are improving.
However it's still unethical.
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)
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.
Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft apply DMCA takedown requests to servers hosted physically outside of the US.
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.
And that’s perfectly fine.
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 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...
> On June 4, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats on the scene estimated that at least 300, and perhaps thousands, of the protesters had been killed and as many as 10,000 were arrested.
> The savagery of the Chinese government’s attack shocked both its allies and Cold War enemies. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that he was saddened by the events in China. He said he hoped that the government would adopt his own domestic reform program and begin to democratize the Chinese political system.
In two weeks of protests around the country, 19 people are dead: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/08/14-days.... Three were possibly shot by the police, under circumstances where the allegation is they opened fire first. Two police officers are dead as a result of drive-by shootings.
The contrast with China couldn't be starker. Here we have protests that involved burning down police stations, and a heavily-armed country where gangs have used the protests as pre-texts for shootings. And we've had a handful of officer-involved deaths. In China, by contrast, police killed hundreds of people at a peaceful protest involving a disarmed population.
I hate to make this point, because it sounds like whataboutism, but perhaps the relative population size of China and the US is worth taking into account.
Let's assume that the 300 figure is the most accurate, since these (Western?) reporters and Western diplomats may have had some incentive in the Cold War to over-estimate the number of deaths. In 1989, China's total population was apparently 1,110,000,000 while the 1990 US census counted 248,709,873 people. That's a scale factor of about 4.5 times.
An interesting comparison then is the 82 people killed by the US government in the 1993 Waco siege, which is equivalent to 366 people if scaled up. Obviously the circumstances are different, but in terms of the magnitude of the number of lives lost, we should probably think of the two tragedies as similar.
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.
But Ramsey Orta essentially was.
The difference in the USA is solely one of pervasiveness, focus, intensity, not any particular outcome.
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.
> 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.
Is that a bad thing if we're trying to promulgate our values?
Trump is doing trump but a lot of politicians and others have spoken out and marched - would that happen in China?
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.
I think that most people can obviously see who has the worse laws, regarding things like censorship.
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.
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.
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'.
https://nypost.com/2020/02/01/how-chinas-xi-jinping-destroye...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#Re-education...
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’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.
What exactly are you getting at?
This is a straightforward lie.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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.
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.
A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.
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.
It’s entirely common for countries to have codes that affect those outside their borders - especially ones that were agreed upon in treaty or trade deal. What is unique here is a country demanding that a non local company engage in censorship outside its territory. These two things are nothing alike
The extraterritorial application of US economic sanctions goes way beyond anything any other country is doing to impose its laws abroad.
These secondary sanctions are not based on international treaties and trade negotiations. They're based on levers of power that the US possesses and exploits, much to the chagrin of foreign countries. They are also not common. There's no other country that comes close to imposing its trade policy on the rest of the world in this manner.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about - these things don’t just happen overnight cause the US says so.
Sanctions in this case have been discussed and formalized by multiple groups and organizations including OECD, FATF and the UN Security Council.
The developing world has been subjected to this sort of crap for a century, at the hands of the west. I mean, the US will invade your nation and kill tens or hundreds of thousands of your people in order to kill one man.
I have to click on a button on every website I visit to comply with some law in a foreign land.
Look at this sort of tyranny (including all the articles in the sidebar): https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/384636/fiji...
One company deleting an account is nothing, absolutely nothing in comparison.
Why the double standard?
Not 'whataboutism', but just to generalise on this: The US do this all the time. I believe that in US law the US criminal law has universal jurisdiction, and they also use the fact that they are such a large and important market that companies will have a presence and assets in the US so they that they'll have to comply (which interestingly is exactly what China is often accused of doing.) Not to mention that they are powerful enough to 'suggest' how to behave to other countries, and we're also seeing that all the time.
So fundamentally I think we're seeing China becoming powerful enough to behave internationally the way the US do, and that is something the US are not used to, being used to being the only superpower in town.
But people should realize that the US law is almost forced to every online company/user.
2. Fuck the Comunist Party of China.
I don't fear for my life when saying the first statement, I've said it in the past on US soil. And I'm saying it right now on a US-based website.
People fear for their lives when making the second statement, esp the Chinese. People wouldn't even be able to read it as it would get quickly censored.
For this reason alone this whole discussion is completely ridiculous.
The US is also far more developed in its methods of political suppression. The voice of the common citizen is virtually absent in D.C. yet the population continues to play along. McCarthyism is ancient history in US politics. Such brutish displays are no longer as effective or required. But the US recently got a taste of how seamlessly the MIC can amplify its violent oppression of citizens, even as they struggle to manage a public health crisis.
You're talking btw with someone born in communism, in Eastern Europe. We blamed the imperialist enemy from the west too and our government saw that enemy among our own people. Everything bad that happened was due to the west trying to undermine our efforts.
All I can say is fuck the CPC and fuck you too.
CCP also undeniably took care of their people during the pandemic, like other "commie" countries like Vietnam, while America is using chemical weapons on theirs amid mass economic strife...
From their blog post
"We strive to limit actions taken to only those necessary to comply with local laws. Our response should not have impacted users outside of mainland China. We made two mistakes:
We suspended or terminated the host accounts, one in Hong Kong SAR and two in the U.S. We have reinstated these three host accounts.
We shut down the meetings instead of blocking the participants by country. We currently do not have the capability to block participants by country. We could have anticipated this need. While there would have been significant repercussions, we also could have kept the meetings running."
I do wonder about this. Given how many core product developers they seem to have in China, if the CCP demanded they... 'enforce their values' globally, or else, I don't think they'd be in much of a position to say no.
Of course if the CCP cared more about enforcing the law than about money, nobody could ever say no to them, but fortunately that's not the case, so there's always room to negotiate.
100% true. American corporations, and businessmen who collaborated with NSDAP in jew gassing "because it was the law," well, just did what they did. It made them genocide collaborators, and criminals regardless if they did it under the law, or not.
As ancient Romans were saying "a crime can be a tiny stone in a bag of flour."
Slavery is a crime, even if it is not unlawful in a last few countries practicing it.
People who go rape children in places, where, well, child rape is not illegal are committing a crime.
Dotcoms who go play ball with criminal states, which make a crime lawful under a law, claiming "we just follow the law!" even if the law itself is criminal, are just as decidedly criminal.
A crime can not be made less criminal under a law for sane person's moral judgement. I would say, a crime that was legislated, makes it an even bigger crime.
A word crime in a sense as a fault, as something objectively morally reprehensible itself underlines that a wrongdoing is discerned through a thorough judgement rejecting anything that is made to hide, "wrap around," or divert focus from the original fault.
It got from something what would've gotten somebody onto pitchforks upon a first sight, to long and arduous arguing about textual meaning of laws, rather than long, and arduous moral judgement of early Greco-Roman trials
Source, unfortunately lacking references in some places: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_of_India
If you want to appeal to a “crime” beyond what people decide is wrong, you are starting to smuggle in an objective moral standard. I think that is hard without appealing to a God or gods.
You know, people used to do so.
Even without that, the loss of objective examination of a fault as a key discerning factor for a justice system was to the detriment of justice.
This leads to a situation when even supreme court judges of countries are being confused by hundreds of contradictory laws of modern legal systems, and can not simply say what is the overall meaning of the law on a given subject without spending hours on research, and writing a lengthy opinion.
What China does is small potatoes compared to the US. The US fined a French bank $9 billion for violating US sanctions.
I personally don't think the US is worse but I think US allies are too weak to put pressure on the US to behave in a civilized and decent way. How would the arm-chair bureaucrats in Brussels even try to mitigate this: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/international...
... we clearly need sanctions against the US but that will upset a lot of Europeans who benefit from an export economy (especially Germany) or the Poles who are ever so fearful against "Russian Agression". The problem really is that no political solutions that we could come up with is going to solve this since US will always be the stronger one for a long time. ... sanctions are a lunatic's dream which will never materialize.
Americans need to step up their own game to sort out their shit politics internally first. No point talking with them about human rights when they're treating their own poor and colored population like that (or talk to them about climate change while they're poisoning the environment in their own country e.g. Flint or many other examples). Problem isn't bad foreign policy but too many truly evil people are in power their, and the general population seems to have abandoned all contact to reality, reason and common sense.
The current riots in the US gives me hope knowing that not everyone is a coward. (though comparing the now to the US of the 60/70ies it is a nation of cowards). While the riots are for a "just" cause (literally reforming the police) they won't solve the US attitude toward other countries ... They still cheer for characters like Hillary Clinton, Obama, Biden, Bush and Trump. And their ignorance against "muslims", or calling poor nations "shithole countries", (again just look how they treat their own poor/homeless).
There is no way that either republicans or democrats will solve this anytime soon. The current system (power structures) needs to burn down first (figuratively) before it can be rebuilt.
It's fair to critique that I shouldn't be turning this into a critique of the US. That said, my main point is that Zoom isn't really doing anything unprecedented in "enforcing one country's geopolitical aspirations across international borders.". Basically every other international company is forced to do the same when it comes to sanctions.
Like, I think companies should take a stand and both aren't acceptable, but Zoom takes new, additional steps here.