19 ms·

Zoom Deleted Events Discussing Zoom “Censorship”

505 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

aspenmayer 6y ago
>“Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations and does not have any policy preventing users from criticizing Zoom,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Zoom does not monitor events and will only take action if we receive reports about possible violations of our Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Community Standards. Similar to the event held by San Francisco State University, we determined that this event was in violation of one or more of these policies and let the host know that they were not permitted to use Zoom for this particular event.” >However, Zoom did not respond to questions about which specific policy was violated or whether other events have been shut down by the company.
- duxup 6y ago
  Zoom already globally banned users on behalf of China related to Tienanmen, and Zoom just said they had to do it. If that is still a thing I don't know what policy you can count on if there is always a "except when someone tells us to censor it" exception to everything. Granted there are always legal changeless and exceptions to everything, but if Zoom is at the mercy of a simple request from a non free state that there's no way to challenge or push back on ... what do any of those rules mean? How quickly can a topic go from ok to getting you banned?
  - criddell 6y ago
    > Zoom just said they had to do it Is that incorrect? What was their other option?
    - gpm 6y ago
      Exit china?
      - yorwba 6y ago
        Which country would give them a few thousand visas for their employees in China to exit together with their families?
        gpm 6y ago
        They'd be extremely unlikely to be able to take their entire engineering team with them. That's an example of why doing business with this company is problematic, but it doesn't change the fact that that is the other option when China demands you censor something.
        duxup 6y ago
        Agreed. The local engineers would obviously have all sorts of considerations if they really were defying the wishes of their local government.
      - criddell 6y ago
        Why would they be allowed to exit China? The government has a stake AFAIK and so they have a say in the matter. If Google or Facebook received an order to take something down from the US government and they decided not to do it, Would leaving the US be a realistic option?
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
davisr 6y ago
Don't use Zoom, and better-yet, ditch proprietary software altogether! Instead, use Signal (which has incredible voice/audio quality) or Jitsi (https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/). There are lots of other Jitsi servers, too. Pick your favorite: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instances https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instance...
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Many solutions which position themselves as Zoom competitors lack any of the differentiating features. Just to pick a few: - Force mic mute on all participants except the presenter, disallow enabling without presenter permission - Webinars for thousands of people (handful of presenters with video, multiple non-video listen-only participants) - 50+ people with video streams enabled in one meeting - Smart background replace with optional green screen support Then there are all the features for education, split rooms etc. But just those four - to my knowledge - exist only in Zoom. Some competitors might have 1-3 of those, none of them have all four. We don't use Zoom because we especially love them, we use Zoom because it's the only one with the features we need.
  - mathstuf 6y ago
    I don't know about the greenscreen bit, but BigBlueButton is likely the closest that I know of. It may well have the feature; I've never checked it out myself. That can also be done by making a fake camera processing pipeline locally, but that's certainly not typical usage. Overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ Notes from deployment for a virtual conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/ https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/
  - davisr 6y ago
    And Zoom is also absolutely corrupt malware. Obviously, you can be the judge for yourself, but I personally don't care if my malware has chromakey--it ain't ever getting close to my PC. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-technology-security-coronavirus-video-conferencing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech... The OS vendor needs to push fixes to uncorrupt people's PCs because Zoom installs a backdoor to spy on webcams? That's worse than terrible--that's criminal. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...
lmilcin 6y ago
Just imagine the world where local bus operators will deny you access to public transport because the algorithm decided your movement pattern looks suspicious. Zoom is a utility to allow people to communicate. Denying ability to organize a webinar is akin to selectively denying people to meet on a plaza where there is no possible direct damage from the meeting (ie. no possiblity for disturbance to neighborhood, violence, etc.) and only possibility that law is broken by speech.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Not that hard to imagine in a country with a No Fly List. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-youre-no-fly-list/ https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-y...
- oefrha 6y ago
  Maybe not from bus operators, but in this world, members of “a designated terror organization in the US” are certainly denied a lot of mobility. Good luck getting a U.S. visa wearing that badge. Background: > Leila Khaled is a Palestinian refugee and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). > Khaled was one of the hijackers in the TWA Flight 840 hijacking in 1969, which was in of itself one of the four simultaneous Dawson's Field hijackings the following year as part of the campaign of Black September in Jordan. The first woman to hijack an airplane,[2] she was later released in a prisoner exchange for civilian hostages kidnapped by her fellow PFLP members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - godelski 6y ago
    I'm not going to lie, I'm not upset with someone hijacking 2 different airplanes being denied access to planes. The punishment seems to fit the crime.
    - 6y ago
fossuser 6y ago
I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre. That they would continue to support the CCP’s interests under a banner of “operating within the laws of the country” is not a surprise. > “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations” This is total nonsense and is demonstrated by their actions - Zoom is an unethical company rationalizing bad behavior and people should avoid using them. I know their software is the best (webex is awful), but they can’t be trusted to even care about doing the right thing. Longer form thoughts on this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html I’m not sure why organizations across the globe trust a company with the majority of its devs operating out of China and vulnerable to CCP influence. There’s a reason the client is banned at Google, and elsewhere in USG. It’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  I have found Jitsi meet to be not only a suitable replacement, but for video streaming quality, superior.
  - cyberbanjo 6y ago
    I've only ever used zoom in browser but jitsi does use more resources, in my experience ,on Linux. but the grand scheme of things my workflow only uses video calling a few times a week. I can spare the compute to spare myself the privacy.
  - drdeadringer 6y ago
    A social//religious group I am apart of has been using Jitsi for our virtual meetings in lieu of physically meeting in person. It is great and has been for months -- so much so that I forget if I've ever used Zoom.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre." Now, now, many HN readers in recent political threads have piously reminded us that corporations have no obligation to allow speech they don't want to host and it's perfectly okay for corporations to deplatform things because it would never be used in bad way. Surely, they could not be wrong? Surely...?
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
Streisand effect?
stevefan1999 6y ago
And this the reason Zoom "censored" it, is pretty funny: it happened so to be in a political fiasco of the middle east, in particular the struggle between Palestine and Israel. Now I'd just say this can be pretty sensitive because politics is like weapons going hot all the time, they might do collateral damages sometimes, so I think Zoom thought they did the right thing to prevent that: it just don't want to get into this geopolitical trouble. They didn't.
sb057 6y ago
Is anybody going to post the "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" quote? How about that xkcd strip? Or a comment about how, as a private company, Zoom can allow or disallow whatever it wants on its platform?
- akersten 6y ago
  In case this comment is in earnest and not flamebait: all of those things are true, and it is simultaneously true that we can advocate for private companies to not do this or to encourage people to use different platforms, without said position being hypocritical as the subtext of your comment implies.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    Perhaps you should advocate to change the US law against foreign terrorists.
- MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  Yes. If you have an issue with their policies, don't use them. They aren't remotely the only name in the game.
bigphishy 6y ago
While on a zoom call this morning, I ran a continuous TCPDUMp to see what servers were being contacted; the majority of the traffic was sent to 193.122.212.125 Edit: This IP is hosted by Oracle https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud. Although zoom ostensibly has its headquarters in san jose, the code is developed 100% in mainland China. We should consider the face that the chinese military likely has access to MITM all zoom conversations on demand. I find the situation disquieting, but I am of two minds because I also feel almost the same level of distrust to facebook and whatsapp conversations.
- LogicX 6y ago
  The IPs are announced by oracle: https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud.
  - bigphishy 6y ago
    I see now, thanks for helping me pinpoint this.
    - justicezyx 6y ago
      Yet, your original comments will be read and cut out of context. For precise communication, consider edit your original post.
  - delfinom 6y ago
    Yea oracle trying desperately to stay relevant has severely undercut everyone else on bandwidth costs. It'll be silly for video apps not to use them. Though the effect on oracle long term will be interesting.
    - GordonS 6y ago
      TBF, bandwidth costs on AWS and Azure are so ludicrously high that it wouldn't be difficult to undercut them on bandwidth. That said, I wouldn't touch an Oracle product with a very long bargepole, even if bandwidth was free.
peter303 6y ago
A Stanford AI policy group called Human Centered AI wont use Zoom for its seminars due to political disagreements with Zooms founder. The result are embarrassing buggy online seminars from an institution supposed at the forefront of computing. Most of Stanford still uses Zoom however. In fact Eric Yuan was at an entrepreneur Stanford seminar last week.
yadco 6y ago
She's an actual terrorist who threatened the lives of civilians, and part of an organisation that killed civilians.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  A leader of the organization.
disown 6y ago
It's interesting that the "news" site advocating for censorship all across youtube, facebook, google, etc is also shaming zoom for "censorship".
ineedasername 6y ago
If you believe there is inappropriate censorship by large tech platforms, this is still probably not the hill to die on over the issue. This is an unrepentant member of a terrorist group who advocates the use of violence as the means to resolve political & religious disputes. [0] Freedom of Speech generally doesn't acknowledge advocacy of violence as a covered by that freedom. [0] Some use words, some use arms and some use politics. Some use negotiations. I chose arms and I believe that taking up arms is one of the main tools to solve this conflict
- nullc 6y ago
  This is San Francisco State University and New York University being censored. Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf? -- a book by a genocidal maniac? I think these events are making a good case that schools (and especially universities-- where people are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas) should not be using zoom.
  - ars 6y ago
    > Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf? If the speaker agreed with Mein Kampf, and was promoting it, I'd have a very hard time criticizing zoom over it. Free speech is important, but this speaker can find her own tools to promote her terroristic ideas, zoom has no obligation to help her. > are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas That's a very charitable interpretation. And if in fact this was a forum to discuss ideas, with pro's and con's, I might agree. But this is simply giving a platform to a terrorist, there is no intellectual discussion going on here. The way you wrote "discussing Mein Kampf", you are implying they would actually be discussing it. But that's not what's going on here. It's kind of like a reverse strawman - you changed the event into a much less controversial one, and then told people they should criticize zoom for blocking it. But zoom didn't block your strawman, they blocked an actual terrorist.
    - nullc 6y ago
      I don't know anything about the event but what was obvious in a glance at the parent article. How many orginizations should get a veto over events run by universities? Wouldn't you prefer to not run events using tools that have vetoed your decisions on appropriate materials and can be expected to do so in the future?
Subsentient 6y ago
"I do not fear death. When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist while I do?" -Epicurus
crb002 6y ago
Another reason to use Jitsi.
diebeforei485 6y ago
I find it a bit weird that someone is banned from Zoom because of something they did 50 years ago.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  It's what she has been doing for 50 years consecutively. She is still an active member of the organization and has not repudiated their ongoing use of violence.
yalogin 6y ago
Why is a known terrorist speaking at a university? Even more so of all entities zoom entering the picture and censoring the last thing I would expect to happen. Terrible thing for zoom to do. Why do they even know/read what’s going on?
ribble 6y ago
welcome to the land of communists and communist sympathizers
4525235235 6y ago
Zoom got where it is in large part through an aggressive native advertising campaign. For example, I don't watch Conan, but during the lockdown, even just walking past a room in my house where it was being watched, I would hear unnecessary mention after mention of Zoom: > https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conan+zoom https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conan+zoom Lest anyone thinks I'm being paranoid, he's been caught doing native ads before: > https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622660/some-game-companies-pay-for-play-on-conans-clueless-gamer-skits https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622660/some-game-companies-p... And his wasn't the only show doing this; other late night hosts would also make it a point to mention Zoom by name. In general, you should assume any conspicuous, unnecessary product references are native ads.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  What would Conan use for videoconferencing instead if Zoom didn't pay?
skc 6y ago
I've said it before, but the only time I ever see positive posts about Zoom(or Slack) on HackerNews is whenever a Microsoft alternative is being discussed. Funny that.
diebeforei485 6y ago
So let's say you're a university, and you want to host a controversial person. Let's say they are a white supremacist, militia type, or a terrorist or former terrorist, or whatever. You conduct a legal analysis and believe you're not breaking any laws by doing this, and are prepared to defend this in court if necessary. Large in-person gatherings are not an option in 2020, so is there a "decentralized" videochat platform that the university can use and host themselves, so that they bear the entire legal risk?

505 points by aspenmayer 6y ago

>“Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations and does not have any policy preventing users from criticizing Zoom,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Zoom does not monitor events and will only take action if we receive reports about possible violations of our Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, and Community Standards. Similar to the event held by San Francisco State University, we determined that this event was in violation of one or more of these policies and let the host know that they were not permitted to use Zoom for this particular event.” >However, Zoom did not respond to questions about which specific policy was violated or whether other events have been shut down by the company.

duxup 6y ago
Zoom already globally banned users on behalf of China related to Tienanmen, and Zoom just said they had to do it. If that is still a thing I don't know what policy you can count on if there is always a "except when someone tells us to censor it" exception to everything. Granted there are always legal changeless and exceptions to everything, but if Zoom is at the mercy of a simple request from a non free state that there's no way to challenge or push back on ... what do any of those rules mean? How quickly can a topic go from ok to getting you banned?
- criddell 6y ago
  > Zoom just said they had to do it Is that incorrect? What was their other option?
  - gpm 6y ago
    Exit china?
    - yorwba 6y ago
      Which country would give them a few thousand visas for their employees in China to exit together with their families?
      - gpm 6y ago
        They'd be extremely unlikely to be able to take their entire engineering team with them. That's an example of why doing business with this company is problematic, but it doesn't change the fact that that is the other option when China demands you censor something.
        duxup 6y ago
        Agreed. The local engineers would obviously have all sorts of considerations if they really were defying the wishes of their local government.
    - criddell 6y ago
      Why would they be allowed to exit China? The government has a stake AFAIK and so they have a say in the matter. If Google or Facebook received an order to take something down from the US government and they decided not to do it, Would leaving the US be a realistic option?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

davisr 6y ago

Don't use Zoom, and better-yet, ditch proprietary software altogether! Instead, use Signal (which has incredible voice/audio quality) or Jitsi (https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/). There are lots of other Jitsi servers, too. Pick your favorite: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instances https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instance...

theshrike79 6y ago
Many solutions which position themselves as Zoom competitors lack any of the differentiating features. Just to pick a few: - Force mic mute on all participants except the presenter, disallow enabling without presenter permission - Webinars for thousands of people (handful of presenters with video, multiple non-video listen-only participants) - 50+ people with video streams enabled in one meeting - Smart background replace with optional green screen support Then there are all the features for education, split rooms etc. But just those four - to my knowledge - exist only in Zoom. Some competitors might have 1-3 of those, none of them have all four. We don't use Zoom because we especially love them, we use Zoom because it's the only one with the features we need.
- mathstuf 6y ago
  I don't know about the greenscreen bit, but BigBlueButton is likely the closest that I know of. It may well have the feature; I've never checked it out myself. That can also be done by making a fake camera processing pipeline locally, but that's certainly not typical usage. Overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ Notes from deployment for a virtual conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/ https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/
- davisr 6y ago
  And Zoom is also absolutely corrupt malware. Obviously, you can be the judge for yourself, but I personally don't care if my malware has chromakey--it ain't ever getting close to my PC. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-technology-security-coronavirus-video-conferencing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech... The OS vendor needs to push fixes to uncorrupt people's PCs because Zoom installs a backdoor to spy on webcams? That's worse than terrible--that's criminal. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...

lmilcin 6y ago

Just imagine the world where local bus operators will deny you access to public transport because the algorithm decided your movement pattern looks suspicious. Zoom is a utility to allow people to communicate. Denying ability to organize a webinar is akin to selectively denying people to meet on a plaza where there is no possible direct damage from the meeting (ie. no possiblity for disturbance to neighborhood, violence, etc.) and only possibility that law is broken by speech.

BurningFrog 6y ago
Not that hard to imagine in a country with a No Fly List. https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-youre-no-fly-list/ https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-y...
oefrha 6y ago
Maybe not from bus operators, but in this world, members of “a designated terror organization in the US” are certainly denied a lot of mobility. Good luck getting a U.S. visa wearing that badge. Background: > Leila Khaled is a Palestinian refugee and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). > Khaled was one of the hijackers in the TWA Flight 840 hijacking in 1969, which was in of itself one of the four simultaneous Dawson's Field hijackings the following year as part of the campaign of Black September in Jordan. The first woman to hijack an airplane,[2] she was later released in a prisoner exchange for civilian hostages kidnapped by her fellow PFLP members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- godelski 6y ago
  I'm not going to lie, I'm not upset with someone hijacking 2 different airplanes being denied access to planes. The punishment seems to fit the crime.
  - 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago

I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre. That they would continue to support the CCP’s interests under a banner of “operating within the laws of the country” is not a surprise. > “Zoom is committed to supporting the open exchange of ideas and conversations” This is total nonsense and is demonstrated by their actions - Zoom is an unethical company rationalizing bad behavior and people should avoid using them. I know their software is the best (webex is awful), but they can’t be trusted to even care about doing the right thing. Longer form thoughts on this: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html I’m not sure why organizations across the globe trust a company with the majority of its devs operating out of China and vulnerable to CCP influence. There’s a reason the client is banned at Google, and elsewhere in USG. It’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries.

dimitrios1 6y ago
I have found Jitsi meet to be not only a suitable replacement, but for video streaming quality, superior.
- cyberbanjo 6y ago
  I've only ever used zoom in browser but jitsi does use more resources, in my experience ,on Linux. but the grand scheme of things my workflow only uses video calling a few times a week. I can spare the compute to spare myself the privacy.
- drdeadringer 6y ago
  A social//religious group I am apart of has been using Jitsi for our virtual meetings in lieu of physically meeting in person. It is great and has been for months -- so much so that I forget if I've ever used Zoom.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "I stopped using zoom after they shut down accounts because people were discussing the Tiananmen Square Massacre." Now, now, many HN readers in recent political threads have piously reminded us that corporations have no obligation to allow speech they don't want to host and it's perfectly okay for corporations to deplatform things because it would never be used in bad way. Surely, they could not be wrong? Surely...?

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

Streisand effect?

stevefan1999 6y ago

And this the reason Zoom "censored" it, is pretty funny: it happened so to be in a political fiasco of the middle east, in particular the struggle between Palestine and Israel. Now I'd just say this can be pretty sensitive because politics is like weapons going hot all the time, they might do collateral damages sometimes, so I think Zoom thought they did the right thing to prevent that: it just don't want to get into this geopolitical trouble. They didn't.

sb057 6y ago

Is anybody going to post the "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" quote? How about that xkcd strip? Or a comment about how, as a private company, Zoom can allow or disallow whatever it wants on its platform?

akersten 6y ago
In case this comment is in earnest and not flamebait: all of those things are true, and it is simultaneously true that we can advocate for private companies to not do this or to encourage people to use different platforms, without said position being hypocritical as the subtext of your comment implies.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Perhaps you should advocate to change the US law against foreign terrorists.
MisterBastahrd 6y ago
Yes. If you have an issue with their policies, don't use them. They aren't remotely the only name in the game.

bigphishy 6y ago

While on a zoom call this morning, I ran a continuous TCPDUMp to see what servers were being contacted; the majority of the traffic was sent to 193.122.212.125 Edit: This IP is hosted by Oracle https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud. Although zoom ostensibly has its headquarters in san jose, the code is developed 100% in mainland China. We should consider the face that the chinese military likely has access to MITM all zoom conversations on demand. I find the situation disquieting, but I am of two minds because I also feel almost the same level of distrust to facebook and whatsapp conversations.

LogicX 6y ago
The IPs are announced by oracle: https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 https://bgp.he.net/ip/193.122.212.125 Reverse DNS for the IP is handled by oracle cloud.
- bigphishy 6y ago
  I see now, thanks for helping me pinpoint this.
  - justicezyx 6y ago
    Yet, your original comments will be read and cut out of context. For precise communication, consider edit your original post.
- delfinom 6y ago
  Yea oracle trying desperately to stay relevant has severely undercut everyone else on bandwidth costs. It'll be silly for video apps not to use them. Though the effect on oracle long term will be interesting.
  - GordonS 6y ago
    TBF, bandwidth costs on AWS and Azure are so ludicrously high that it wouldn't be difficult to undercut them on bandwidth. That said, I wouldn't touch an Oracle product with a very long bargepole, even if bandwidth was free.

peter303 6y ago

A Stanford AI policy group called Human Centered AI wont use Zoom for its seminars due to political disagreements with Zooms founder. The result are embarrassing buggy online seminars from an institution supposed at the forefront of computing. Most of Stanford still uses Zoom however. In fact Eric Yuan was at an entrepreneur Stanford seminar last week.

yadco 6y ago

She's an actual terrorist who threatened the lives of civilians, and part of an organisation that killed civilians.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
A leader of the organization.

disown 6y ago

It's interesting that the "news" site advocating for censorship all across youtube, facebook, google, etc is also shaming zoom for "censorship".

ineedasername 6y ago

If you believe there is inappropriate censorship by large tech platforms, this is still probably not the hill to die on over the issue. This is an unrepentant member of a terrorist group who advocates the use of violence as the means to resolve political & religious disputes. [0] Freedom of Speech generally doesn't acknowledge advocacy of violence as a covered by that freedom. [0] Some use words, some use arms and some use politics. Some use negotiations. I chose arms and I believe that taking up arms is one of the main tools to solve this conflict

nullc 6y ago
This is San Francisco State University and New York University being censored. Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf? -- a book by a genocidal maniac? I think these events are making a good case that schools (and especially universities-- where people are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas) should not be using zoom.
- ars 6y ago
  > Would you also have zoom suppress a SFSU lecture discussing Mein Kampf? If the speaker agreed with Mein Kampf, and was promoting it, I'd have a very hard time criticizing zoom over it. Free speech is important, but this speaker can find her own tools to promote her terroristic ideas, zoom has no obligation to help her. > are expected to be able to engage with controversial or wrong-headed ideas That's a very charitable interpretation. And if in fact this was a forum to discuss ideas, with pro's and con's, I might agree. But this is simply giving a platform to a terrorist, there is no intellectual discussion going on here. The way you wrote "discussing Mein Kampf", you are implying they would actually be discussing it. But that's not what's going on here. It's kind of like a reverse strawman - you changed the event into a much less controversial one, and then told people they should criticize zoom for blocking it. But zoom didn't block your strawman, they blocked an actual terrorist.
  - nullc 6y ago
    I don't know anything about the event but what was obvious in a glance at the parent article. How many orginizations should get a veto over events run by universities? Wouldn't you prefer to not run events using tools that have vetoed your decisions on appropriate materials and can be expected to do so in the future?

Subsentient 6y ago

"I do not fear death. When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist while I do?" -Epicurus

crb002 6y ago

Another reason to use Jitsi.

diebeforei485 6y ago

I find it a bit weird that someone is banned from Zoom because of something they did 50 years ago.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
It's what she has been doing for 50 years consecutively. She is still an active member of the organization and has not repudiated their ongoing use of violence.

yalogin 6y ago

Why is a known terrorist speaking at a university? Even more so of all entities zoom entering the picture and censoring the last thing I would expect to happen. Terrible thing for zoom to do. Why do they even know/read what’s going on?

ribble 6y ago

welcome to the land of communists and communist sympathizers

4525235235 6y ago

Zoom got where it is in large part through an aggressive native advertising campaign. For example, I don't watch Conan, but during the lockdown, even just walking past a room in my house where it was being watched, I would hear unnecessary mention after mention of Zoom: > https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conan+zoom https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conan+zoom Lest anyone thinks I'm being paranoid, he's been caught doing native ads before: > https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622660/some-game-companies-pay-for-play-on-conans-clueless-gamer-skits https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622660/some-game-companies-p... And his wasn't the only show doing this; other late night hosts would also make it a point to mention Zoom by name. In general, you should assume any conspicuous, unnecessary product references are native ads.

srtjstjsj 6y ago
What would Conan use for videoconferencing instead if Zoom didn't pay?

skc 6y ago

I've said it before, but the only time I ever see positive posts about Zoom(or Slack) on HackerNews is whenever a Microsoft alternative is being discussed. Funny that.

diebeforei485 6y ago

So let's say you're a university, and you want to host a controversial person. Let's say they are a white supremacist, militia type, or a terrorist or former terrorist, or whatever. You conduct a legal analysis and believe you're not breaking any laws by doing this, and are prepared to defend this in court if necessary. Large in-person gatherings are not an option in 2020, so is there a "decentralized" videochat platform that the university can use and host themselves, so that they bear the entire legal risk?