Zoom blocked accounts of non-Chinese activists after request from Chinese government

Zoom admits it has temporarily or permanently blocked three accounts after China asked Zoom to do so. Two of these accounts were based in the United States, the third account belonged to a Hongkonger. The company says it will decline these requests in the future.

According to a Zoom blog post, the company received a notification from the Chinese government about four major public Tiananmen protest commemorations in May and early June. For these commemorations, which took place on Zoom, invitations were distributed via social media, including details about the Zoom meetings. Commemorating the Tiananmen protest is banned in China. The government therefore demanded from Zoom that the company would stop these meetings and that the host accounts would be blocked.

Zoom says it did not forward any user information or content from the meeting to the Chinese government, but it did heed the call and commissioned a US-based Zoom team to investigate. In three of the four meetings, participants had IP addresses from mainland China. In two of these meetings, ‘a significant share’ of IP addresses came from mainland China. These three meetings were discontinued and the meeting hosts were temporarily or permanently blocked. No IP addresses from mainland China were found at the fourth meeting. Zoom therefore allowed this meeting to go ahead.

The cessation of the meetings and the blocking of the activist hosts was met with much criticism, write CNBC and The Guardian, among others. Looking back, Zoom admits it made mistakes. The company only writes that it takes action to comply with local laws, but that it went too far in the three cases mentioned. For example, the host accounts were not from mainland China and the blocking of these accounts was not correct. The accounts have since been reactivated.

The second mistake was completely stopping the meetings. Zoom acknowledges that it could have allowed these meetings to go ahead, “although there would have been significant consequences.” Zoom does not write what the consequences would have been. The company is now unable to block meeting participants based on country and admits it should have anticipated the need for this feature.

In order to better deal with such situations in the future, Zoom wants to make a number of changes. For example, the company will refuse requests from the Chinese government if they affect users from outside the Chinese mainland. In the coming days, Zoom will also be working on a feature to remove or block certain meeting participants ‘based on geography’. Finally, Zoom will adjust global policies to respond to these requests. This amended policy must be published by June 30.

The Tiananmen protest is a sensitive topic in China. The student protest with an estimated one million participants was brutally crushed by the Chinese government on June 4, 1989. For this, the government used the army and tanks. It was never clear how many people died. Mentioned numbers vary from hundreds to thousands of victims. Since then, it has been banned in China to talk about the protest.