Zoom will enforce Chinese Communist Party censorship, the company confirmed in an official release yesterday. Earlier this week, after it was alerted by the Chinese government, the company suspended three accounts for hosting Tiananmen Square memorials, including a U.S.-based pro-democracy group that featured mothers of those killed in the protests. The other two were based in the U.S. and Hong Kong. Zoom says a fourth meeting was allowed to proceed because it didn’t include participants from mainland China.
Memorials for those killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre are illegal under Chinese law. The blunder, according to Zoom, was suspending the hosts and making meetings unavailable to non-China-based users, rather than blocking individual attendees based in China. The host accounts have been reinstated, but the company says that it plans to implement a new feature specifically to “remove or block at the participant level based on geography.”
“This will enable us to comply with requests from local authorities when they determine activity on our platform is illegal within their borders,” they write, adding, “however, we will also be able to protect these conversations for participants outside of those borders where the activity is allowed.”
The aforementioned host, California-based pro-democracy group Humanitarian China, reported that the company shut down its account days after its memorial conference, which it said drew 250 participants from around the world and 4,000 viewers on social media. A Hong Kong-based organiser, Lee Cheuk-yan, chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance, said that his account was also suspended before he could host a conversation about the Chinese government’s influence beyond its borders, proving the meeting’s point. “The account was suspended before the talk started,” Lee told the Associated Foreign Press. “I’ve asked Zoom many times whether this is political censorship but it has never replied to me.”
Zoom says that it has not shared “any user information or meeting content.” When asked whether Zoom would go so far as to monitor topics of discussion, even those not advertised by meeting hosts, Zoom pointed Gizmodo to a tweet stating that “Zoom does not proactively monitor meeting content” and that Zoom does not have “backdoors” where “Zoom or others” can invisibly enter meetings (i.e., if you’re being spied on, at least you’ll know). Zoom has hidden some of the replies to that tweet, naturally.
“I am gravely concerned about the security of the users from China,” Humanitarian China president and 1989 Tiananmen Square organiser Zhou Fengsuo told Gizmodo, adding that he believes Zoom “is taking orders from Beijing.” He’s unsure where he might go for a decent alternative. “Unfortunately any commercially successful software will be subject to CCP’s rules,” he said.
Zhou said that the conference was the first Tiananmen Square memorial that many China-based attendees had ever been able to attend, and shared a moving excerpt in which a mother recounted the death of her then-high school-aged son, whose body was found buried in a middle school after the protests. She says that she’s been asking the government to formally acknowledge the massacre for decades and that she is constantly surveilled. The clip is on YouTube and therefore unavailable in China.
Zoom’s open admission that it will monitor users’ locations mid-meeting is alarming, to say the least. Though the company stated teen invaders with search engine skills.
Zoom has also recently come under fire for how it frames its relationship with U.S. law enforcement. The company’s implied stance is that it only proactively monitors for child abuse, but the devil could be in the details — what else fits into the category of “like child abuse”? Zoom has not replied to Gizmodo’s request for comment on whether it would be willing to shut down meetings of groups like sex workers that operate on the legal fringes.
In its post about the Tiananmen memorials, Zoom says it hopes “that one day, governments who build barriers to disconnect their people from the world and each other will recognise that they are acting against their own interests, as well as the rights of their citizens and all humanity.” Unfortunately, it goes on to say, those governments have laws, and it’s forced to navigate those laws as it expands its service. In its explanation of “how we fell short,” the company says that it “could have” kept the censored meetings running, but hedges: “There would have been significant repercussions.”