Zoom’s upcoming feature will let Chinese govt block users involved in illegal activity

Zoom said that moving forward it will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.

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Zoom will soon allow Chinese government block users involved in illegal activities (Image: Reuters)

Zoom accepts that the Chinese government asked it to censor accounts of pro-democracy Chinese activists based in the US, in the latest blog post. The company has now announced to be working on new blocking features to comply with requests from the Chinese government. The platform was highly criticised for suspending the three user accounts — Lee Cheuk-yan, Wang Dan, and Zhou Fengsuo — based in Hong Kong and the US following China’s request.

“Recent articles in the media about adverse actions we took toward Lee Cheuk-yan, Wang Dan, and Zhou Fengsuo have some calling into question our commitment to being a platform for an open exchange of ideas and conversations. To be clear, their accounts have been reinstated, and going forward, we will have a new process for handling similar situations,” Zoom noted in a blogpost.

The video conferencing platform said that moving forward it will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.

Zoom said that it is developing technology over the next several days that will enable the platform 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,” the blog post noted.

Additionally, Zoom is also working towards improving global policy to respond to such requests from the government. “We will outline this policy as part of our transparency report, to be published by June 30, 2020,” the company noted in the post.

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The controversy

Stating what exactly happened Zoom said that in May and early June the Chinese government informed them about “four large, public June 4th commemoration meetings” on the platform 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,” the company noted.

Zoom clarified that they did not provide any user information or meeting content to the Chinese government and further clarified that it doesn’t have a backdoor that allows someone to enter a meeting without being visible.

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“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,” Zoom noted. It further stated that a team reviewed the meeting metadata two of the four meetings and found a significant number of mainland China participants.

The company said that “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.”

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