Thread by @JimMillward

Zoom is at it again. Last summer it cancelled meetings about Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Now it has cancelled university meetings about Palestine (SFSU) and meetings about the cancelation (U Hawaii Manoa) and NYU. mesana.org/advocacy/lette…

A third party service provider simply cannot be allowed to determine content on our campuses. If they say their corporate policies require them to do so, our university policies must require us to cancel our contracts. There are other providers of the same services.

Note that while Zoom is censoring just as it did China-related content last summer, this time there is no excuse of obeying "local laws" from authoritarian countries. The security / accessibility problem in authoritarian countries is a tough question since all providers face it.

But this is much simpler: if a 3rd party provider censors content on university campuses, that violates academic freedom. We wouldn't let the contractor who builds our classroom tell us how to teach in it. The phone company doesn't tell me what to say on the phone.

Xerox doesn't dictate what I photocopy or scan. Canvas or Blackboard don't vet my syllabus. We need alternatives to Zoom available on campus right now, and we need to be able to switch platforms right away if this happens. There are others with the same look and feel.

Universities need to renegotiate their contracts to protect academic freedom and diversify providers to break-up Zoom's monopoly. Where Zoom is integrated with Canvas, maybe FCC should look into if that is an anticompetitive practice.

Note that Zoom's behavior has now resulted in statements of concern from TWO Area Studies associations: MESA now, and AAS last summer. This isn't a one-off blip, but a systematic problem with censorship. Please RT widely to colleagues and students. asianstudies.org/aas-statement-…