Zoom's China censorship
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of Axios broke the news that Zoom closed account of U.S.-based Chinese activist “to comply with local law”
Zhou Fengsuo, founder of the U.S. nonprofit Humanitarian China and former student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, organized the May 31 event held through a paid Zoom account associated with Humanitarian China.
About 250 people attended the event. Speakers included mothers of students killed during the 1989 crackdown, organizers of Hong Kong's Tiananmen candlelight vigil, and others.
On June 7th, the Zoom account displayed a message that it had been shut down, in a screenshot viewed by Axios. Zhou has not been able to access the account since then, and Zoom has not responded to his emails, he told Axios.
A second Zoom account belonging to a pro-democracy activist, Lee Cheuk Yan, a former Hong Kong politician and pro-democracy activist, was also closed in late May. Lee has also received no response from Zoom.
Several other news organizations followed her story with more details, and Yuan Yang reported in the Financial times that a third meeting organized by June 4 student leader Wang Dan, who is now based in the US, was interfered with and the host accounts shut.
Zoom has a large engineering group based in China, as it discloses in all of its public filings. It also has a history of issues related to China. Zoom’s recent growth has been astronomical and in trying to deal with the massive technical challenges of scaling up so fast it is easy to understand how mistakes could be made. At the same time, Zoom is trying to keep on the right side of the PRC authorities so the service can work in China.
The censorship of these meetings does not look to be related to technical issues. Rather, the company appears to be either proactively censoring to keep Beijing happy or responding to requests from the relevant PRC authorities.
Zoom’s PR statement on this is far from adequate:
“Just like any global company, we must comply with applicable laws in the jurisdictions where we operate. When a meeting is held across different countries, the participants within those countries are required to comply with their respective local laws. We aim to limit the actions we take to those necessary to comply with local law and continuously review and improve our process on these matters. We have reactivated the US-based account.”
I have some questions I believe Zoom should answer about these incidents:
What is the PRC law cited that has those meetings not in compliance?
What is the PRC law cited to shut down the account of a US-based user?
What is the PRC law cited to shut down the account of a Hong Kong-based user?
Did a request from PRC authorities trigger these moves?
If requests from the PRC authorities triggered these moves, which PRC organization made the requests and to whom at Zoom were the requests made?
If requests from the PRC authorities triggered these moves, was Zoom CEO Eric Yuan involved in the decision to act on the requests?
Is there an established process at Zoom to deal with requests from PRC security services? If so, what is it, and how many requests does Zoom get each month/quarter/year?
Do the Ministry of Public Security or any other PRC security organs have offices inside any Zoom China facilities, as they do with large PRC Internet firms?
Does Zoom have any systems that scan keywords of meeting descriptions or participant names?
Has Zoom been given a list by PRC authorities of keywords and/or individuals to be flagged and/or filtered?
Does Zoom have any systems that scan the audio content of meetings in progress?
Why did it take an inquiry from a reporter for Zoom to reinstate the account of US-based Zhou Fengsuo?
I am sure there are more, feel free to add them in the comments, or in tomorrow’s open thread. These are very sensitive questions and most companies operating in the PRC would not answer, but Zoom should no longer get the benefit of the doubt over its China-related issues and given how many people, organizations, government bodies and political campaigns now rely on its services the company must err on the side of transparency.
Georgetown University Professor James Millward points out that whatever Zoom is doing may make it an unacceptable choice for educational institutions:
And Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations tweeted about a recent Zoom meeting she had, sadly not funny now:
Update: Soon after I wrote this Zoom issued a statement via its official blog - Improving Our Policies as We Continue to Enable Global Collaboration:
In May and early June, we were notified by the Chinese government about four large, public June 4th commemoration meetings on Zoom that were being publicized on social media, including meeting details. The Chinese government informed us that this activity is illegal in China and demanded that Zoom terminate the meetings and host accounts.
We did not provide any user information or meeting content to the Chinese government. We do not have a backdoor that allows someone to enter a meeting without being visible.
For one of the meetings, even though the Chinese authorities demanded we take action, we chose to keep the meeting undisturbed because it did not have any participants from mainland China.
For two of the four meetings, a U.S.-based Zoom team reviewed the meeting metadata (such as IP addresses) while the meeting was in progress, and confirmed a significant number of mainland China participants.
For the fourth situation, the Chinese government showed us a social media invitation for an upcoming meeting referencing a June 4th commemoration event and demanded we take action. The Chinese authorities also notified us of a prior meeting under this account that they considered to be illegal. A U.S.-based Zoom team confirmed the attendance of mainland China participants in that prior meeting.
Zoom does not currently have the ability to remove specific participants from a meeting or block participants from a certain country from joining a meeting. As such, we made the decision to end three of the four meetings and suspended or terminated the host accounts associated with the three meetings.
Going forward Zoom will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.
Zoom is developing technology over the next several days that will enable us 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; however, we will also be able to protect these conversations for participants outside of those borders where the activity is allowed.
We are improving our global policy to respond to these types of requests. We will outline this policy as part of our transparency report, to be published by June 30, 2020.
They should still be asked all of the above questions.
Related stories:
The three incidents are reviving concerns about the fast-growing Silicon Valley company’s susceptibility to Chinese government influence weeks after the firm began facing scrutiny over security, including its routing of data through China. Coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the episode also highlights the world’s dependency on services such as Zoom and their ability to control speech.
Zoom on Thursday acknowledged that “a few recent meetings” related to China have been disrupted.
In each instance, event organizers told The Washington Post that they relied on Zoom in lieu of in-person events because of social distancing and travel restrictions. And each of the Zoom accounts and events was created and hosted outside mainland China but appeared to be quashed under Chinese government pressure after they were publicly advertised...
Lee Cheuk-yan, a union leader and Labour Party figure in Hong Kong, said a Zoom account he used to host talks was shut down without explanation on May 22 just 30 minutes before he was scheduled to stream a talk by Jimmy Sham, a leading Hong Kong pro-democracy activist.
The talk, which had been promoted in Hong Kong protest circles, went ahead and was streamed on YouTube and Facebook without incident, Lee said, but his Zoom account remains disabled.
Zoom disables accounts of former Tiananmen Square student leader | Financial Times $$
The annual Tiananmen Square commemoration was hosted on Zoom by a group of Chinese activists in the US, including Wang Dan, one of the most prominent leaders of the pro-democracy student movement that was crushed by the Chinese army in Beijing on June 4 1989.
Mr Wang’s team shared screenshots with the Financial Times of his Zoom call being cancelled twice and two of his team’s paid Zoom accounts being disabled. The cancellations started just as the meetings were due to begin on the morning of June 4 in Washington, where Mr Wang is based. He added that as of Thursday, the accounts remained disabled.
The event marked the first time so many high-profile figures with direct ties to the 1989 pro-democracy movement had come together in one space, said Zhou, who kicked off the conference by playing The Wound of History, a Chinese song written to commemorate the June 4 movement.
Other speakers included Zhang Xianling, a member of Tiananmen Mothers, a group of human rights activists led by mothers of protesters believed to have died in the crackdown.
Zoom suspends free service to individuals in China - Nikkei Asian Review - May 19
California-based videoconferencing company Zoom Video Communications has suspended individual users from signing up in China, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned.
As of May 1, individual free users can no longer host meetings on Zoom but will still be able to join them. Only paid enterprise accounts and individuals who had upgraded to paid accounts prior to the cutoff date will be able to host meetings.
Going forward, the company will allow only enterprises with proof of business registration and corporate banking accounts to purchase its service, according to details posted on a Chinese Zoom website managed by China reseller Donghan Telecom. "Individual purchases will not be accepted," it says.
Thanks for reading.