Zoom Confirms Beijing Asked It To Suspend Activists Over Tiananmen Square Meetings (axios.com) 145
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.
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.
WOW (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm old enough to remember the Cold War. I shudder to think of what would happen to any country that actively helped the Soviet Union repress it's own citizenry, or any Westerner that tries to help them. This is just insane. But hey, Black Lives Matter.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ultimately with similar levels of tech, power comes from population. NATO had 3 times Warsaw Pact's population. China has about the same population as NATO so it has a chance of beating NATO. Militarily is not required when you can win the war of cultural influence.
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That would ultimately come down to one side showing what the other side really is. China wouldn't win that game.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Interesting)
Militarily is not required when you can win the war of cultural influence.
China doesn't have much cultural influence or soft power. Their foreign policy based on "might makes right" has alienated nearly all of their neighbors. China has no real friends and their only two reliable allies, Pakistan and Cambodia, are based on common enemies (India and Vietnam respectively), not shared values.
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Half of Africa is indebted to China, and AFAIK some South American countries too.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't have to be in it for China, most countries will be in it for themselves. Being hooked on "made in China" is soft power, there's a reason for the saying "put your money where your mouth is". As long as the rulers get to keep ruling and it's better for their economy Putin is in it for Russia, Erdogan is in it for Turkey, all the shitholes in the Middle East - you think a super Islamic dictatorship like Saudi-Arabia can't flip sides? Many former colonies in Africa will go "Fight for our former colony masters? Fuck that" and stay out. And it's not countries really like to jump into somebody else's war, the UK was happy to wave Chamblerlain's "peace in our time" around as long as they weren't in Hitler's sights. The US didn't really get into WW2 until Pearl Harbor, for us here in Europe thank god for arrogant Japanese fuckers. I'm not sure the US would have been there for D-day without them.
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They have soft power. Economic power is a soft power. With 1.4B people, that's a HUGE market of consumers. Any capitalist can see that a big market is a big opportunity to sell stuff to. China k
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Re:WOW (Score:4, Interesting)
Both NATO and China know that an all-out war isn't possible, because neither side would win: The nuclear weaponry would be used, and both sides are destroyed. That's why superpowers have these cold wars. The giant militaries are for having occasional small territorial disputes, while the real conflict is fought through economic manipulations, cultural influence, and proxy warfare.
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Well, I hope you get another mod point, but I'm still having the trouble seeing how to link your thoughtful comment to Zoom...
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I picture the day some movie studio execs were sitting around the board room crying about how piracy was ruining their business. Then one of them looks at a map and sees how big China is and then looks up the population. He brings his hand to his forehead, "My god, a billion potential new customers" and starts hyperventilating.
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I shudder to think of what would happen to any country that actively helped the Soviet Union repress it's own citizenry
Zoom is not a country and despite what you and the Orange guy think we're not at war with China, not even a cold war. Throughout history capitalist enterprises have helped questionable regimes. The most prominent in the tech industry was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
The US behaved as disgracefully as the USSR
The US behaved disgracefully in many ways but was never at the same moral depth as the USSR.
At the border between the East and West, who guarded the wall? Which direction did they aim their guns?
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Plenty went in the other direction
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I'm sure all 10 of them got the better life they were looking for by becoming one of comrade secretary general's inner circle.
Actually I take that back, a number of them died in the mind contro - er, sorry - "re-education" camps.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Plenty went in the other direction
Indeed. Many idealistic Americans emigrated to the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s.
Thousands of them were rounded up in Stalin's purges and were executed or worked to death in Siberian gulags.
The few that managed to escape and return home were no longer idealistic.
The Forsaken Americans [wikipedia.org]
Re: WOW (Score:2)
You ate that ignorant eh? It's not even funny, just idiotic.
Sighed:
Someone who actually lived there.
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Like those few morons that defected to North Korea?
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I watched a good BBC documentary about communism is Europe after WW2. In East Germany a 14 year old school girl drew a hair bow on a newly installed poster of Joseph Stalin (his poster replaced Hitler's) in her school. She was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp.
What is Xi up to? (Score:2)
First trace of intelligence in the discussion. Not surprised by the handle nor the lack of favorable mod points. (Okay, so it's modded halfway to visibly "Insightful" (as of this writing), but close only counts in horseshoes and nuclear warfare. (Sadly appropriate to be inappropriate on this topic?))
What I was actually looking for (but not actually expecting at Slashdot 2020) was some sort of insight into the game Xi is playing here. On it's face, this is absurd. Even China would admit that other countries
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Your post ain't that clear to me, but I think there's a good question in there: "what is Xi up to?", or 'why would China do this in such a loud and gratuitous way?'.
I'm guessing that this is a signal to other companies not to forget to put their China censorship features in early. Zoom is forced into public humiliation so that others don't end up hosting meetings of dissidents and being embarrassed in future. More generally, they did a good job with Microsoft and to some extent CISCO showing that compani
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Actually the presentation on Slashdot was rather misleading. Surprise, surprise! Not.
The way it appeared here made it sound daft, and whatever you can say about Xi, it usually isn't "daft". Based on the story as reported by NHK out of Japan (on their international version), the reality was much nastier than it seemed here.
However my revised reaction leads me to the hypothesis that Xi was just taking advantage of Zoom's naivete to grab a few cheap propaganda points. Embarrassing Zoom and possibly damaging it
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OTOH, we're talking about a government that fears Winnie the Pooh.
Re:What is Xi up to? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: What is Xi up to? (Score:2)
I think first and foremost, the Chinese government wants to prevent the discussion of this topic domestically. When I worked and lived in Shanghai (up to 2014), not one of my colleagues had seen a picture of Tank Man for instance (or so they claimed), and these topics were treated cautiously. It sounds like in this case that Zoom will kowtow to Beijing inside China but need to do some work so they don't have to outside China, and I'm sure we don't have enough info to know for sure.
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Basic concurrence, but the story as summarized on Slashdot was not clear at all. Ran across another source from Japan and understand it a bit better now. Too late to worry about it by Slashdot time? I need to go look for a dupe?
(My "favored" general solution approach there would be for "hot" stories to move more slowly down the front page.)
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A $10 deposit per identity.
You think pretty small. How many identities cold the Koch Bros have bought? As opposed to, say, someone like Greta Thunberg when she was just starting out.
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I can't tell if it's a troll response, but I do have two initial thoughts.
(1) The payments would create better evidence and make it easier to trace and remove the astroturf accounts. I do agree that wholesale astroturf is a serious problem, but from the perspective of fundamentally crooked businessmen like the surviving Koch brother, RoI is important. However I admit that I have essentially no understanding of the appeal of Twitter, so what's the baseline for measuring any RoI that involves Twitter?
(2) The
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Cixin Liu fan here. What's mind-boggling is that though this would seem to be the most unfilmable series of all time, an adaptation of "The Three-Body Problem" is actually in the works.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
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The USA has regularly used chain gangs [wikipedia.org], equivalent to Soviet forced labour though not . Incarceration was used, via entrapment, against people who were trying to provide free breakfasts [wikipedia.org]. Finally, if we pay a little wider attention there were actual death camps and tens of thousands of deaths caused by the USA in South America [wikipedia.org] including the support of the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile [wikipedia.org].
I think it's really important to understand the importance of the "lesser evil"; it's impor
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The USA has regularly used chain gangs [wikipedia.org], equivalent to Soviet forced labour though not...
damn..
"though not with anything like the death rate and other things that made the gulags"
was what I was going to say. The truth is quite often somewhere in the middle, though sometimes it's completely out the side. That never changes what it is and how important it is.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone claiming that the United States invoked campaigns of fear, terror, and murder similar to the Soviet Union is a complete buffoon. Sorry, the truth isn't anywhere near "the middle".
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Anyone claiming that the United States invoked campaigns of fear, terror, and murder similar to the Soviet Union is a complete buffoon. Sorry, the truth isn't anywhere near "the middle".
I did a little comparison to understand this
...................US.backed.forces*.......USSR.forces
Torture............Widespread..............Widespread
Forced labour......Some....................Widespread
Rape...............Yes.....................Some@
Mass.Murder........Yes.....................Yes
Starvation.........Some....................Yes
numbers............hundreds.of.thousands...millions
reasons............political...............political
attacked democracy yes.....................yes
judi
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They are the ones that call anyone who disagrees with them Nazis, Fascists, and Racists while being completely oblivious of how their tactics mirror actual Nazis, Fascists, and Racist tactics.
Thanks for reminding me.
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On US hands? The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ph... [theatlantic.com]
That blood was shed by the Soviets!
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Tell me about the time in america where you''d get sent to the gulag for not clapping enough.
Doesn't seem too different from the time America sent Americans to interment camps because they have Japanese heritage.
You're fucking monsters. The Russians are fucking monsters. We're fucking monsters. Welcome to the reality of looking back over history.
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Doesn't seem too different from the time America sent Americans to interment camps because they have Japanese heritage.
Even as horrible as the forced internment was, 100% of gulag residents would have gladly traded places with them.
Re:WOW (Score:5, Insightful)
1950's US second red scare could get you pretty close to that if they thought it meant you were a communist.
People accused by McCarthy were denied employment in the civil service, the military, and the entertainment industry. Careers were ruined.
That was disgraceful. But claiming it was "pretty close" to the death camps of the Soviet Gulag is absurd.
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Yeah that is not a confusion you are infact a racist.
Re:WOW (Score:4, Informative)
Holodomore denial is a real thing. Stalin's apologists say he didn't kill anybody and that it's all western lies.
Nobody talks about those things anymore, though there is quite a social media presence of them, just like holocaust deniers. Speak of which, try being a holocaust denier and see just how long your job lasts. I personally wouldn't want to have somebody like that on my payroll.
Polically motivated famine in Ukraine (Score:2)
Someone does talk about them. An excellent book, Red Famine , about the Holdomore was published quite recently. Not a major part of the book, but she does say quite a bit about the political factors that contributed to ignoring the tragedy (from various perspectives).
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We should own up to WHY there was a Red Scare in the first place.
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No, because of the intrinsic evil of a godless Communist oligarchy that willfully murdered millions of its own citizens! You are as blind as a bat.
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You ask challengingly, who wasn't a moral black hole, right before saying you don't believe in whataboutism.
Clearly, you have no idea what you're talking about.
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Maybe it will help if we go over how the conversation went:
Person: USSR did X
Whataboutist: But what about America?
Me: What did America do that was significantly outside the norm?
You: OMG you're a whataboutist too!
Now we are here:
Me: No. I'm asking what did America do that was so bad that somehow justifies what the USSR did?
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The USSR, like any Socialist dictatorship, was a corrupt, violent and brutally oppressive police-state. It's the only way a fundamentally dysfunctional system like Socialism can be maintained for more than a brief period.
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None of which really parallel the purges, gulags or extreme torture of the USSR.
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we weren't as bad the USSR but by today's standards it was still a very dark piece of our history.
Give Trump another term and you'll see.
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All the authoritarianism I've seen in the USA lately seems to come from the left. The right seems to be interested in old school freedom.
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Re: WOW (Score:2)
Yeah, the gulags in Montana were really bad.
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There's a word for what you just did. It's called "howaboutism" (or whataboutery if you like that one better). Guess who's that word associated with?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:WOW (Score:4, Informative)
it's not such a bad example, because this is exact opposite of the cold war with both sides helping to silence dissident activity on both sides. That is really really really different from communist witchhunt in usa and persecution in ussr.
Although there were cases in cold war too where both sides just in unison just stashed something under the rug. But this is more like if west germany worked actively to ensure that west german broadcasts weren't receivable inside east germany to preserve the east german system.
They should have held their meetings on Facebook I guess.
You know in Thailand the government would like to shut down and censor several pages on Facebook, but they can't just ban a single url inside facebook because facebook uses https. Why don't they just ban facebook and block facebooks servers from dns etc like they try with some xxx websites and the daily mail and such? well there would be instant instability and revolt if they tried that - so they just don't.
as for zoom, they kinda fucked themselves because this is 100000000% admitting that they follow who and from where goes on to their zoom meetings - and what the f they mean that they don't know the ip address space from where the connections come? of course they know that. they could just ban the mainland ip space. in fact they have to jump through extra fucking hoops just to ensure that the meetings work seamlessly from mainland china. it's all about them wanting to work from mainland china and to continue to work from mainland china. they actually wanted to close the rooms so that you couldn't vpn etc into them either.
zooms total fail here is admitting that they even do such monitoring. but zoom has gotten off with so much lies anyways that I doubt they care, like just lying about end to end encryption etc.
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Seriously? How many people wound up dead because the government didn't like their overt support of the CCCP?
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The cold war is not a good example. The US behaved as disgracefully as the USSR did with regards to censorship and vilification of anyone that "thought" differently.
Wow, I never knew about the network of corrective labor camps across Alaska. Where were they?
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The cold war is not a good example. The US behaved as disgracefully as the USSR did with regards to censorship and vilification of anyone that "thought" differently.
Because Dalton Trumbo being fired from Hollywood was equivalent to the slaughter of twenty million kulaks?
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this activity is illegal in China if you don't pay (Score:2)
this activity is illegal in China if you don't pay free to be on the web.
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The reality, the tech corporations are more than happy to censor as long as there is a buck in it. Their users as just gullible idiots, who will get squeezed and squeezed harder as time go on. More charges, more advertising, worse service and more censorship.
Think about this (Score:3, Insightful)
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Make *EVERY* Zoom meeting a Tiananmen Square Zoom Meeting.
12:00 - Budget, accounts and Tiananmen Square meeting
13:15 - Marketing Tiananmen Square strategy conference call
15:00 - Snack budget, vending machines, Tiananmen Square and sundries round-table
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That depends on who exerts more influence and over whom. China can't give a shit what America thinks or the message China is spreading in the west. China is controlling its own citizens and it doing so by influencing American companies to toe the line, or kicking them out.
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Leftists get angry when you bring up that point.
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"I have problems in following logic" - you.
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Except they can't. Each company doing business in a country is required to comply with the laws of said country. In China this means enforcing censorship, in the US it means providing mechanisms for lawful interception and providing easy access to intelligence agencies. If the US were serious about curtailing Chinese censorship, it would have to apply embargoes against US companies trying to enter into the Chinese domestic market. I don't see that happening any time soon.
May the IRS tax them FULLY (Score:2)
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Except they can't. Each company doing business in a country is required to comply with the laws of said country.
Except it's the fucking internet and China couldn't censor a company that big if they tried. This is a foreign nation pushing around a US company, plain and simple. They should unironically be carpet-nuked for it. Free speech is the most central piece of American values, they're using our internet, they have no foot to stand on to push around a US corp, certainly not because of some winnie-the-pooh-looking dictator.
POS (Score:2)
Thats Why (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.techrepublic.com/a... [techrepublic.com]
https://fortune.com/2020/04/06... [fortune.com]
Zoom is a Chinese company (Score:2)
Nobody with friends and family still in China is totally free and independent.
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Most of the GIs who fought in WW1 still had family in Germany as massive German immigration happened in the 1880s to the US.
In case you dont know the largest ethnic group in the US is German origin. German origin footsoldiers won WW1 against Germany for the US.
Loyalties are not based simply on language and ethnicity or even family ties.
US fought 2 World Wars against Germany and yet today the grandson of a German immigrant is the President.
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"and yet today the grandson of a German immigrant is the President."
And he's working for Russia! It's just a big happy international party!
Too late (Score:2)
"Asked"? (Score:5, Funny)
"Asked it" to suspend... yeah right!
"Hey Zoom! Nice company you got there. Should would be a shame if something happened to it."
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"working on technology" (Score:3)
I would kindly ask Western companies: (Score:2)
please stop being Chinese Communist Party companies - produce in western countries, or just not in China.
Illegal in China? (Score:2)
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It didn't go as planned.
Nobody believes you (Score:2)
Zoom said it does not have the ability to block participants from a certain country...
Nobody believes that.
Dumbest explanation (Score:2)
Zoom said it does not have the ability to block participants from a certain country
This must be the most stupid explanation of all time. Any amateur system admin can explain that the block can be done and no changes to the application is needed. The most primitive tech person knows how to identify which country an IP is from, or which block of IPs belongs to which country. The block can be implemented at the firewall and that should take care of the block. But they went ahead and made this up as an excuse. EXPOSED!!!
So? (Score:2)
It's not like Zoom would block accounts if a US lawmaker would ask them to because the user of that account does something through Zoom which is illegal in the US. So let's not pretent this is any different. Zoom didn't have the technology in their platform to ban/block on region, and they are now going to implement that.
Oh, it's China asking, oh well then it's a no no, but if the US would ask it, well, then it wouldn't be a problem....
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US Government cannot tell a Chinese company to do this because they dont have jurisdiction. Same thing, Chinese government does not have the authority to tell Zoom to suspend
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oh how wrong you are... Yes it has to adhere to US laws and regulations, but it also has to adhere to the laws and regulations of any country it provides its service to.
And we've seen more than enough of US government telling chinese companies to not do something...
And no the Chinese government can't tell Zoom to suspend a US customer account, but the problem here was Zoom not being able to prevent chinese 'customers' from joining that US 'customers Zoom meeting, and what that US 'customer' did was not lega
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The problem happens at the edge. Like in this case where Zoom terminated a user who lives in the U.S. because the Chinese government said so. Sometimes a legally mandated action in one country is a crime in another.
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No, that's where you are wrong, Zoom didn't terminate the account of the user who lives in the US because the Chinese goverment said so, they terminated the account because Zoom could not block people form a certain region to JOIN the meeting the user in the US set up, and so the easiest way for now to stop users from China to connect to that meeting (which is what the Chinese government asked) is by blocking the whole account.. So get your facts straight.
It was a technical shortcoming on Zoom's part why t
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Yes, the oath-breakers who swore to defend the constitution have turned traitor, and are demanding that even the POTUS be censored.
Not coincidentally they also put the blame for every COVID death on the president as well, an act that provides aid and comfort to the CCP.
Yes let's get real. They'd be more than happy to censor you too, to serve their own interests as well as that of a foreign hostile adversary.
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How many of you said it was ok for twitter and Facebook and other social media companies to do whatever they want on their platforms because they're private?
I don't recall the U.S. government asking Twitter or Facebook to suspend anyone's account because they were posting about history. The Chinese government was apparently monitoring activity on Zoom, and the Chinese government, not Zoom, made the "request." Zoom, the company, is perfectly within its rights to have whatever Terms of Use it wants and say that topics X, Y, & Z are off-limits on its platform. If you don't like the terms, don't use the platform. This is not the same as a foreign, repressive re