Zoom Confirms Beijing Asked It To Suspend Activists Over Tiananmen Square Meetings

[SaM]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios:

U.S. video conferencing company Zoom issued a statement on Thursday acknowledging that the Chinese government requested that it suspend the accounts of several U.S.- and Hong Kong-based Chinese activists for holding events commemorating the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Zoom claims that it only took action because the Chinese government informed the company that “this activity is illegal in China” and that meeting metadata showed “a significant number of mainland China participants.” Zoom said it does not have the ability to block participants from a certain country, and so it made the decision to end some of the meetings and suspend the host accounts.

Zoom said that it will no longer allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China, and that it is working on technology that will allow it to remove or block participants based on geography. The statement indicates that Zoom is agreeing to China’s demands to construct an in-company censorship apparatus to prevent mainland users from accessing sensitive meetings.