EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

In the late spring of this year, the Chinese government notified Zoom that Tiananmen Square-related online conversations should be shut down, and that accounts hosting them should be disabled. This was to apply to any user from mainland China.

Subsequently, Zoom prohibited three different individuals from organizing Tiananmen Square massacre memorials on Zoom. Last week, US-based activist and president of Humanitarian China, Zhou Fengsuo, announced that his paid-for Zoom account had been shut down.

“The company saw that some of the meetings had attendees in mainland China, so it ended three of the four meetings and suspended or shut down the accounts that had hosted them,” writes CNBC.

However, not every attendee or host was based in mainland China, making it a complex task to decipher whose meetings and accounts should be shut down. The company was relying on meta data to inform its decisions.

As a result of these new challenges, Zoom is currently developing technology that can remove or block users depending on the country that their device is located in. This will potentially expand the company’s abilities to meet government requests.

“We are improving our global policy to respond to these types of requests. We will outline this policy as part of our transparency report, to be published by June 30, 2020,” stated a company spokesperson.

For more on this story, visit CNBC.