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This is a crisis point for everyone who supports political free speech. Every corporation and business person is watching this to see which hurts their bottom

This is a crisis point for everyone who supports political free speech. Every corporation and business person is watching this to see which hurts their bottom line less, suppressing free speech globally, or angering China. As consumers, we must make sure that they get the message loud and clear that suppressing free speech globally on behalf of China is going to hurt their bottom line far more than China will. Otherwise, we will live in a world where China controls what discourse goes on in the world by controlling the corporations.

vkou 7y ago
No, it's not. It's a crisis for speech by entities that are seeking to make millions of dollars in China. Those corporations were never in the business of defending free speech in the first place. If you were expecting them to, I would suggest finding better role models. This is not a problem for anyone who does not care about selling out to the Chinese market.
- azernik 7y ago
  > anyone who does not care about selling out to the Chinese market It's a crisis for speech by customers of those companies, who must make clear that they are just as capable of punishing those companies as the Chinese government.
  - vkou 7y ago
    When you're a tournament winner, you're not a customer of the company, you're a partner that's using the tournament as a soapbox for your politics.
    - Dan_JiuJitsu 7y ago
      Coincidentally this is something an employee of a dictatorship would say. You must work with Winnie the Poo.
  - belltaco 7y ago
    The Chinese customers are also capable of punishing those companies, not just the Chinese government.
- mwfunk 7y ago
  Having expectations of moral behavior from someone doesn't mean you consider them a role model, it means you have standards. A role model is someone you aspire to be, but I expect everyone I deal with to have some sort of basic standards of decency. If not, I don't deal with them and neither should anyone else.
streb-lo 7y ago
> is going to hurt their bottom line far more than China will. Yea right. a) China has a huge market and b) most people don't really care. Go to /r/hearthstone or /r/wow and browse by new. People don't care.
- lucasmullens 7y ago
  I just looked at https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/new/ and 2 of the 3 first posts are about China.
  - streb-lo 7y ago
    That's not really representative. 5/30 posts are about HK and of those 5 I counted the post that says "I don't care bout HK stuff." Across all the blizzard subs except maybe /r/blizzard it's almost business as usual.
    - magashna 7y ago
      That's not true. It's spilled over in Overwatch and even the NintendoSwitch subs.
- desine 7y ago
  I have no evidence, but I am willing to bet there is a large China based disinformation campaign regarding players and their opinions. Right now nothing should be taken at face value, nobody should be taking their feelings from someone else's reddit comment. Not that I'm holding my breath.
  - sodosopa 7y ago
    Tencent is also an investor in reddit. I wouldn’t doubt they’re turfing the threads.
- errantspark 7y ago
  Tencent owns a mere 5% of Actiblizzard and they generate less than 10% of their revenue in China. Sure it's an expanding market, but I don't think that the amount of pressure necessary to make it unprofitable is outside the reach of the protesting consumer-base. I don't really believe it will play out like that, but one can hope.
rayiner 7y ago
These incidents are making me reevaluate my views on the Cold War. Growing up after the Cold War was over, I always thought the domestic reaction (in the US) to the Soviet Union and Communism was overblown. Of course, growing up during the 1990s boom, it was inconceivable to me that any foreign country could have the slightest negative impact on me, or that there was any possibility that the future offered anything other than the American way of life for more and more people.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Pity you didn't spend any time behind the Iron Curtain when it was still up. Formative experience if there ever was one for me.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I'm from, and lived in, Bangladesh, which was also formative. At the time, we saw America as the future for Bangladesh too. The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism as a competitor to Westernization (in its Anglo-American form) came as a total shock. At least to my family. For the same reason I find China's Belt and Road initiative deeply disquieting.
- notyourday 7y ago
  The difference is that the USSR was a small market, so it was possible to crush it economically, which is what the West did. This time around China is looking to become the largest market and if we let it to become one before China sheds its "communism with Chinese characteristics", it will crush the West.
  - erentz 7y ago
    And in large part that is due to our different approach to China. Opening up trade with China enabled its economy to reach the level it did today. In part [0] the minds thought trade would bring liberalization in China. But that didn’t happen, it’s quite a thing to walk back now but clearly it needs to happen. Unfortunately the politics of the US and EU are in absolute disarray so coordinating that is difficult to imagine. ([0] In another part forming relationships with China was also in part about putting a wedge between China and the USSR. Which may have been more productive but doesn’t explain the normal relationship since 1990.)
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> This is a crisis point for everyone who supports political free speech. It’s a crisis created by the political movement to force every company to take a political stance on every issue, and to force companies to not associate with political out-group members. I’m sure it feels really good when you’re in the in-group, but quite obviously gets people really worked up when it doesn’t come down on their side.
- vkou 7y ago
  This is the correct interpretation of this issue. All of a sudden, millions of people who are quite happy to be fence-sitters about all sorts of injustices across the world (Many of them in their own countries) have decided to draw the line on China and Hong Kong. According to them, anyone who does not explicitly support pro-HK politics is an enemy, and must be punished accordingly. (Even if what they want is a no politics policy.) This is, of course, the same sort of 'with us or against us' behaviour, that those same fence-sitters criticized when it came to other injustices...
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  Can't feel bad for companies since they started this with their targeted advertising campaigns in which they took sides in social and political issues to gain favor with certain customer demographics. Now that the precedent has been set, they're being pushed and pulled in every direction as a consequence. They're reaping what they sowed.
  - Pfhreak 7y ago
    Companies have done this since companies were a thing. Consumption is always political, always social.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  A neutral political stance would be to do nothing and ignore the "incident". Blizzard took explicit action and chose a side.
  - 7y ago
the_duke 7y ago
Blizzard stock hasn't suffered yet. And I doubt the cancelled subscriptions and closed accounts will have a significant long term impact. Especially since they mitigated account deletions by only allowing manual deletion requests with a submitted id; due to very conveniently timed and curiously persistent technical difficulties... These public outrage storms quickly subside and people go back to playing the games. It's curios to me though how so many companies completely bend the knee to China, even though Chinese only have a small amount of stock or revenue percentage. I guess the market potential is just too great. And of course for companies like Apple they are at the mercy of Chinese supply chains.
- gpm 7y ago
  Blizzard stock suffering, or not, just has to do with what the public markets think the likely economic outcome of this is for Blizzard. So it seems that so far their shareholders think this will blow over, but there's nothing that makes them a perfect predictor of that. If they keep cancelling events, if Blizzcon crashes and burns, if sales go way down, the stock will suffer.
- rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
  Prisoners dilemma. Any individual corporation that stands up for human rights suffers the potential loss of market space to competitors and the likely revolt by shareholders, for which ~1/3 of American stocks are owned by foreign investors for whom there is no guarantee that they care about human rights either. If American corporations banded together to stand up to China the way they claim to care so gosh darn much about LGBTQ+ rights, they could send a powerful signal that some values are higher than profits. But who wants to be first?
- falcolas 7y ago
  Based on what I’ve seen, investors are taking a wait and see attitude - waiting to see what happens with Blizzcon. There are investment guides that are advocating selling ATVI, and those will rise as the outcry and practical impact on Activision-Blizzard’s marketing and sales show. This hit is a pure hit against Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch marketing, and it’s brought the Switch port into the light of day. Sales of the Switch port will be watched closely by both sides.
cloakandswagger 7y ago
I agree with you completely, but this whole debacle has highlighted what seems to be hypocrisy in the general public's reaction to this. Remember when The Daily Stormer got kicked off CloudFlare and a whole host of other platforms, to the point that no one would take their business and they were effectively censored? The average take on that seemed to be a mix of "Free speech doesn't apply to private companies" and "If you don't like it, build your own CDN/DNS/Paypal/certificate authority etc" So what's the difference with this? Again, I agree completely with the concerns here, but what happened to TDS and a lot of other fringe sites was even more blatant and serious: They were de facto banned from the internet, whereas this is all over...a video game. Did everyone come to the conclusion that corporations are powerful enough to effectively snuff out free speech since that happened, or is it different because this is China, or...?
- thatswrong0 7y ago
  The difference is that a country which is committing human rights abuses is pressuring said private company (among _many_ others) to abridge free speech. The other case is a private company not wanting to host right-wing neo-nazi content of which the general public isn’t really accepting. I don’t see the hypocrisy here at all.. tbh I don’t even quite understand how you can conflate the two situations other than the fact the two words “free” and “speech” are involved.
  - cloakandswagger 7y ago
    Both situations feature people being banned by companies due to their speech because the companies fear backlash from more powerful entities (China or the media/general public respectively). They seem pretty comparable to me.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      It's called double-standards. It's OK to cut free speech for those you don't like, it's not OK to cut free speech for those you like.
vbezhenar 7y ago
Is it considered acceptable to push your political agenda on an unrelated events? For me it looks strange and out of place. Now punishing people for that might be too harsh. But if every sport event will turn into political debates (imagine US and RU sportsmen arguing with each other), it'll be bad and free speech has nothing to do with it IMO.
- falcolas 7y ago
  Blizzard did this first; set the stage for mixing politics with video games. Blizzard hosted and promoted a LGBTQ+ event in Overwatch, and much like Mei is being used by HK, Blizzard are using Tracer as a representative of the LGBTQ+ community. That the event was not done in Russia and China, and that Tracer has a different sexual orientation in those countries, is quite telling. The only difference is that the LGBTQ+ political statement had the effect of boosting their revenue, whereas the HK statement may have the opposite effect.
- larkeith 7y ago
  Indeed - platforms like post game interviews are not platforms for political views. However, it is naive to believe that Blizzard would have reacted anywhere near as strongly to any political statement not related to China. The inappropriateness of Blitzschung's actions does not excuse Blizzard far less acceptable reaction.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  It's a complicated issue. This historical event and all the differing opinions about it might be relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salu...

vkou 7y ago

No, it's not. It's a crisis for speech by entities that are seeking to make millions of dollars in China. Those corporations were never in the business of defending free speech in the first place. If you were expecting them to, I would suggest finding better role models. This is not a problem for anyone who does not care about selling out to the Chinese market.

azernik 7y ago
> anyone who does not care about selling out to the Chinese market It's a crisis for speech by customers of those companies, who must make clear that they are just as capable of punishing those companies as the Chinese government.
- vkou 7y ago
  When you're a tournament winner, you're not a customer of the company, you're a partner that's using the tournament as a soapbox for your politics.
  - Dan_JiuJitsu 7y ago
    Coincidentally this is something an employee of a dictatorship would say. You must work with Winnie the Poo.
- belltaco 7y ago
  The Chinese customers are also capable of punishing those companies, not just the Chinese government.
mwfunk 7y ago
Having expectations of moral behavior from someone doesn't mean you consider them a role model, it means you have standards. A role model is someone you aspire to be, but I expect everyone I deal with to have some sort of basic standards of decency. If not, I don't deal with them and neither should anyone else.

streb-lo 7y ago

> is going to hurt their bottom line far more than China will. Yea right. a) China has a huge market and b) most people don't really care. Go to /r/hearthstone or /r/wow and browse by new. People don't care.

lucasmullens 7y ago
I just looked at https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/new/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/new/ and 2 of the 3 first posts are about China.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  That's not really representative. 5/30 posts are about HK and of those 5 I counted the post that says "I don't care bout HK stuff." Across all the blizzard subs except maybe /r/blizzard it's almost business as usual.
  - magashna 7y ago
    That's not true. It's spilled over in Overwatch and even the NintendoSwitch subs.
desine 7y ago
I have no evidence, but I am willing to bet there is a large China based disinformation campaign regarding players and their opinions. Right now nothing should be taken at face value, nobody should be taking their feelings from someone else's reddit comment. Not that I'm holding my breath.
- sodosopa 7y ago
  Tencent is also an investor in reddit. I wouldn’t doubt they’re turfing the threads.
errantspark 7y ago
Tencent owns a mere 5% of Actiblizzard and they generate less than 10% of their revenue in China. Sure it's an expanding market, but I don't think that the amount of pressure necessary to make it unprofitable is outside the reach of the protesting consumer-base. I don't really believe it will play out like that, but one can hope.

rayiner 7y ago

These incidents are making me reevaluate my views on the Cold War. Growing up after the Cold War was over, I always thought the domestic reaction (in the US) to the Soviet Union and Communism was overblown. Of course, growing up during the 1990s boom, it was inconceivable to me that any foreign country could have the slightest negative impact on me, or that there was any possibility that the future offered anything other than the American way of life for more and more people.

jacquesm 7y ago
Pity you didn't spend any time behind the Iron Curtain when it was still up. Formative experience if there ever was one for me.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I'm from, and lived in, Bangladesh, which was also formative. At the time, we saw America as the future for Bangladesh too. The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism as a competitor to Westernization (in its Anglo-American form) came as a total shock. At least to my family. For the same reason I find China's Belt and Road initiative deeply disquieting.
notyourday 7y ago
The difference is that the USSR was a small market, so it was possible to crush it economically, which is what the West did. This time around China is looking to become the largest market and if we let it to become one before China sheds its "communism with Chinese characteristics", it will crush the West.
- erentz 7y ago
  And in large part that is due to our different approach to China. Opening up trade with China enabled its economy to reach the level it did today. In part [0] the minds thought trade would bring liberalization in China. But that didn’t happen, it’s quite a thing to walk back now but clearly it needs to happen. Unfortunately the politics of the US and EU are in absolute disarray so coordinating that is difficult to imagine. ([0] In another part forming relationships with China was also in part about putting a wedge between China and the USSR. Which may have been more productive but doesn’t explain the normal relationship since 1990.)

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> This is a crisis point for everyone who supports political free speech. It’s a crisis created by the political movement to force every company to take a political stance on every issue, and to force companies to not associate with political out-group members. I’m sure it feels really good when you’re in the in-group, but quite obviously gets people really worked up when it doesn’t come down on their side.

vkou 7y ago
This is the correct interpretation of this issue. All of a sudden, millions of people who are quite happy to be fence-sitters about all sorts of injustices across the world (Many of them in their own countries) have decided to draw the line on China and Hong Kong. According to them, anyone who does not explicitly support pro-HK politics is an enemy, and must be punished accordingly. (Even if what they want is a no politics policy.) This is, of course, the same sort of 'with us or against us' behaviour, that those same fence-sitters criticized when it came to other injustices...
Mountain_Skies 7y ago
Can't feel bad for companies since they started this with their targeted advertising campaigns in which they took sides in social and political issues to gain favor with certain customer demographics. Now that the precedent has been set, they're being pushed and pulled in every direction as a consequence. They're reaping what they sowed.
- Pfhreak 7y ago
  Companies have done this since companies were a thing. Consumption is always political, always social.
alasdair_ 7y ago
A neutral political stance would be to do nothing and ignore the "incident". Blizzard took explicit action and chose a side.
- 7y ago

the_duke 7y ago

Blizzard stock hasn't suffered yet. And I doubt the cancelled subscriptions and closed accounts will have a significant long term impact. Especially since they mitigated account deletions by only allowing manual deletion requests with a submitted id; due to very conveniently timed and curiously persistent technical difficulties... These public outrage storms quickly subside and people go back to playing the games. It's curios to me though how so many companies completely bend the knee to China, even though Chinese only have a small amount of stock or revenue percentage. I guess the market potential is just too great. And of course for companies like Apple they are at the mercy of Chinese supply chains.

gpm 7y ago
Blizzard stock suffering, or not, just has to do with what the public markets think the likely economic outcome of this is for Blizzard. So it seems that so far their shareholders think this will blow over, but there's nothing that makes them a perfect predictor of that. If they keep cancelling events, if Blizzcon crashes and burns, if sales go way down, the stock will suffer.
rm_-rf_slash 7y ago
Prisoners dilemma. Any individual corporation that stands up for human rights suffers the potential loss of market space to competitors and the likely revolt by shareholders, for which ~1/3 of American stocks are owned by foreign investors for whom there is no guarantee that they care about human rights either. If American corporations banded together to stand up to China the way they claim to care so gosh darn much about LGBTQ+ rights, they could send a powerful signal that some values are higher than profits. But who wants to be first?
falcolas 7y ago
Based on what I’ve seen, investors are taking a wait and see attitude - waiting to see what happens with Blizzcon. There are investment guides that are advocating selling ATVI, and those will rise as the outcry and practical impact on Activision-Blizzard’s marketing and sales show. This hit is a pure hit against Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch marketing, and it’s brought the Switch port into the light of day. Sales of the Switch port will be watched closely by both sides.

cloakandswagger 7y ago

I agree with you completely, but this whole debacle has highlighted what seems to be hypocrisy in the general public's reaction to this. Remember when The Daily Stormer got kicked off CloudFlare and a whole host of other platforms, to the point that no one would take their business and they were effectively censored? The average take on that seemed to be a mix of "Free speech doesn't apply to private companies" and "If you don't like it, build your own CDN/DNS/Paypal/certificate authority etc" So what's the difference with this? Again, I agree completely with the concerns here, but what happened to TDS and a lot of other fringe sites was even more blatant and serious: They were de facto banned from the internet, whereas this is all over...a video game. Did everyone come to the conclusion that corporations are powerful enough to effectively snuff out free speech since that happened, or is it different because this is China, or...?

thatswrong0 7y ago
The difference is that a country which is committing human rights abuses is pressuring said private company (among _many_ others) to abridge free speech. The other case is a private company not wanting to host right-wing neo-nazi content of which the general public isn’t really accepting. I don’t see the hypocrisy here at all.. tbh I don’t even quite understand how you can conflate the two situations other than the fact the two words “free” and “speech” are involved.
- cloakandswagger 7y ago
  Both situations feature people being banned by companies due to their speech because the companies fear backlash from more powerful entities (China or the media/general public respectively). They seem pretty comparable to me.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    It's called double-standards. It's OK to cut free speech for those you don't like, it's not OK to cut free speech for those you like.

vbezhenar 7y ago

Is it considered acceptable to push your political agenda on an unrelated events? For me it looks strange and out of place. Now punishing people for that might be too harsh. But if every sport event will turn into political debates (imagine US and RU sportsmen arguing with each other), it'll be bad and free speech has nothing to do with it IMO.

falcolas 7y ago
Blizzard did this first; set the stage for mixing politics with video games. Blizzard hosted and promoted a LGBTQ+ event in Overwatch, and much like Mei is being used by HK, Blizzard are using Tracer as a representative of the LGBTQ+ community. That the event was not done in Russia and China, and that Tracer has a different sexual orientation in those countries, is quite telling. The only difference is that the LGBTQ+ political statement had the effect of boosting their revenue, whereas the HK statement may have the opposite effect.
larkeith 7y ago
Indeed - platforms like post game interviews are not platforms for political views. However, it is naive to believe that Blizzard would have reacted anywhere near as strongly to any political statement not related to China. The inappropriateness of Blitzschung's actions does not excuse Blizzard far less acceptable reaction.
PeterisP 7y ago
It's a complicated issue. This historical event and all the differing opinions about it might be relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salu...