American Citizens’ Zoom Calls Are Being Censored By The Chinese Government

Drew Harwell and Ellen Nakashima, reporting for The Washington Post:

A security executive with the video-tech giant Zoom worked with the Chinese government to terminate Americans’ accounts and disrupt video calls about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, Justice Department prosecutors said Friday.

[…]

Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.

Jin monitored Zoom’s video system for discussions of political and religious topics deemed unacceptable by China’s ruling Communist Party, the complaint states, and he gave government officials the names, email addresses and other sensitive information of users, even those outside China.

We’ve known Zoom has plenty of issues for a while now, but this is outrageous. Where is our strongman president when foreign adversaries are directly impeding American citizens’ freedom of speech? He’s made a huge issue about social media companies and their alleged censorship of conservative voices (which is bullshit), but now that there’s real censorship of Americans by China, he’s silent, either too stupid to understand what’s going on, too selfish to care, or so pathetic that he’s still nursing his post-election wounds.

The first amendment was designed to protect Americans against government overreach, but I never imagined we would have our first amendment rights challenged or stripped away by another government than our own. There has to be consequences for this.