Details Emerge on How Zoom Censored Users in America for Communist China

An executive at the popular video-conferencing app Zoom was charged by the DOJ with conspiring to terminate Zoom meetings that commemorated the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre at the behest of the Chinese government. The incident is a troubling signal of the lengths companies based in America will go to maintain access to the lucrative Chinese market.

MSNBC reports that on December 18, prosecutors from the U.S. justice department charged a China-based executive for the video-conferencing company Zoom with conspiring to terminate Zoom meetings that commemorated the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre at the request of the Chinese government.

Breitbart News recently reported that Zoom executive Xinjiang Jin, who worked as the company’s government affairs liaison, contacted employees at Zoom’s headquarter about the anniversary of the massacre on June 4th. Jin told his colleagues in the U.S. that the “internet police” in China had increased pressure on the company to censor politically sensitive content of Chinese users no matter where in the world they were.

The Justice Department complaint states that Jin said that China “has implemented real-name registration/verification, so there are not many that do bad things anymore. All are from the U.S., if we don’t handle them well, net security will ban all overseas servers, so I respectfully ask you to take this seriously.” A U.S. colleague replied: “We will hurry and ban all the free accounts from US04,” which refers to the name of a Zoom server.

Discussing a public Zoom meeting on June 4, Jin suggested to a U.S.-based colleague: “It’s a public meeting, so we could join and report to Zoom [U.S.] as [an] abus[ive] meeting, then you [in the] U.S. may have evidence to suspend it.” The colleague then terminated the account used to hose the meeting. The organizer then restarted the meeting in another room using a different account, some of the accounts featured avatars of naked women and the flag of the Islamic State.

Around this time, emails were sent to Jin reporting the accounts for “inciting violence,” or “pornography,” which Jin then relayed to his U.S.-based colleague who then terminated the accounts. So it would appear that in order to justify deleting the accounts a China-based Zoom executive was running schemes to trigger a violation of Zoom’s terms of services, and a U.S.-based colleague was facilitating it.