Zoom has shut down the account of a Chinese activist group in the US after the organization used the video conferencing service to hold an event commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
On May 31, the group, Humanitarian China, held the event on Zoom’s video conferencing service to mark the 31st anniversary of the protests. However, on June 7th, the organization’s paid account was shut down, according to Axios, which was first to report the news.
“Zoom has not responded to our requests for an explanation,” Humanitarian China said in a statement, which adds: “We are outraged by this act from Zoom, a US company.”
Zoom, which is based in San Jose, California, isn’t denying the account shut down. The company indicated to PCMag it had to crack down on the meeting because some of the attendees were based in China, a country that generally censors content concerning the Tiananmen Square protests.
“We must comply with applicable laws in the jurisdictions where we operate,” Zoom said in a statement.” When a meeting is held across different countries, the participants within those countries are required to comply with their respective local laws.”
Over 250 people attended the Zoom meeting, with a "significant portion" based in China, according to the activist group. "Invited speakers were detained or put under house arrests to stop them from this conference," added Zhou Fengsuo, founder of Humanitarian China.
Media coverage of the shut down appears to have prompted Zoom to reverse its decision to suspend the account, presumably because the activist group is based in the US, and not in China. "We have reactivated the US-based account," the company told PCMag.
Nevertheless, Humanitarian China is accusing the company of doing the bidding of the Chinese government to silence its activities. “It seems possible Zoom acted on pressure from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) to shut down our account. If so, Zoom is complicit in erasing the memories of the Tiananmen Massacre in collaboration with an authoritarian government,” the group said in the statement.
It remains unclear how Zoom learned of the meeting or discovered that some of the attendees were based in mainland China. But per the company’s privacy policy, Zoom can collect the IP addresses to a video session, enabling it to learn which countries users are connecting from. The video conferencing service also has subsidiary offices based in China, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government.
The account shut down occurs after another activist based in Hong Kong, Lee Cheuk Yan, has also accused Zoom of censorship. On May 26, Lee reported that the company had pulled access to his account as he was giving a lecture series on China’s authoritarian regime.