Thread by @BRSoucek

Big academic freedom news: Zoom has officially announced that it is handing off content moderation to universities for (almost) everything hosted on university Zoom accounts that is "related to the institution's academics or operations."

Policy here:
explore.zoom.us/docs/en-us/tru…

This is an issue UC's system-wide faculty Committee on Academic Freedom has been working on since late last year. The faculty released a statement a few months ago calling on Zoom to make a change like this: senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports…

Since then, I've been meeting with Zoom's lawyers, UC's lawyers, and law and tech people at several other schools to develop a policy that would get Zoom out of the business of deciding whether classes, talks, student events etc. comply with Zoom's standard terms of service.

For those of us at public universities, Zoom's standard terms of service threatened to bar content that the First Amendment doesn't allow us to regulate. And nearly all higher ed users have been outsourcing their academic freedom protections to Zoom since moving online last year.

One important thing this policy doesn't do: clarify Zoom's responsibilities (and legal exposure) under the federal material support statute. This is what led to the highest profile Zoom cancellation controversies to date. See, e.g., @AAUP @HankReichman: academeblog.org/2020/10/29/aau…

We need clarity on what the material support statute covers when it comes to academic events. But I'm not sure it's Zoom's job to take the lead on testing those waters. My hope is that universities, including my own, will take steps to get clarity from the Biden Admin or courts

So this policy doesn't solve all our academic freedom worries about Zoom. But it is a huge step nonetheless. Yesterday, the operations of my whole university (and probably yours) were subject to content regulation by a private company. Today they largely aren't.