https://news.sky.com/story/zoom-disables-accounts-of-chinese...
>The suspension targeted Humanitarian China, an organisation based in the US, after it held a call with roughly 250 people, including a number who dialled in from China.
They said it was wrong to do, reinstated those accounts, and are building the functionality to enforce those Chinese laws without ever impacting users outside China.
That's from their blog. https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...
They are actually admitting that they're going to prevent people IN CHINA from connecting to a meeting that is presumably hosted IN THE US. That doesn't make it better, it makes it WORSE. You're basically telling the world that China will dictate how you operate WOLRDWIDE not just in China.
There's a pretty big difference IMO.
The same would be if they blocked Gmail of US citizens because of discussions related to China.
What they aren't doing is actively blocking users from China getting to www.google.com, and they aren't censoring searches Chinese users do on www.google.com because those resources aren't hosted in China and aren't subject to Chinese law.
Zoom on the other hand IS blocking users from China accessing resources in the US and while they may have "undone" the ban, they banned US users from their platform for breaking a Chinese law that they aren't subject to. Namely talking about the Tienanmen Square massacre.
Unless you've got a magic bullet to give Wall Street a conscience, that wasn't going to happen.
By the way, in general my understanding is that the "beholden to their shareholders as a public company" (and thus forced to make the most remunerative decisions) belief is a myth, a public company is free to make ethical choices (if its major shareholders don't oppose them).
Based on a complaint from china regarding non-Chinese citizens with non-china accounts, zoom cancelled the non-china accounts.
Full stop. Let that sink in.
If you are wondering who zoom will accommodate you have your answer. This is a fact. This is what we are calling "racism"?
It's entire contents is an argument that Zoom is evil because Eric Yuan is Chinese-American. It doesn't say a single one of the things you're saying.
We can be upset at power structures and at their effects. Taking that further to make assumptions about groups of people is racist.
You'll get a Liu Xiaobo once in a while, but much more often you'll have people that, while easily wonderful as people per se, are disgracefully forced, or have been convinced to, do some things that they shouldn't do.
When will this meme die?
Zoom is NOT a Chinese company. It is incorporated in and headquartered in the US. Like any American company ever, it follows US laws in the US, and local laws in other companies where it operates. End of story.
Yes their culture certainly has stronger cultural internal ties to China, due to the number of Chinese employees, but what has that got to do with anything? At the end of the day, they're a public, profit-driven corporation trying to make lots of money across the entire world.
It's not like they're secretly and nefariously doing the CCP's bidding, which seems to be the veiled suggestion people keep making.
Seriously, every time someone brings up that Zoom is "really" a Chinese company, it comes across as borderline racism or conspiracy-mongering or both. And while I'd usually never comment on someone using a throwaway account, in this case when you're pushing these kinds of shady "stronger than the more-commonly-discussed" insituations, I think using a throwaway here is representative of exactly the kind of astroturfing that spreads malicious rumors without evidence.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23510886