One person wrote:
Maybe a journalists’ sister’s boyfriend just got laid off by a shrinking competitor,
Then a second person wrote:
And maybe calling the person a “journalist” is a compliment way above their actual skillset or role expectations; maybe his editor thought they could sell a lot more eyeballs by writing some sensationalist headline grab, because in the age of digital media it’s much more about MONEY than it is about FACTS.
Just saying.
This isn’t how reporting works at the Washington Post, or at virtually any mainstream U.S. news organization.
But to avoid the debate about that, it might be useful to go straight to the source–the criminal complaint filed by DOJ in the Eastern District of New York. I don’t know how to attach the PDF, but I can summarize it here. This is the summary of the allegations, which DOJ calls the “Criminal Scheme.” “Company-1,” obviously, is Zoom. DOJ alleges:
The investigation revealed that Jin (the Zoom executive) has conspired with others to use Zoom’s systems in the U.S. to censor the political and religious speech of individuals located in the U.S. and around the world at the direction and under the control of officials in the PRC government. (That’s DOJ’s term.) Among other actions taken at the direction of the PRC government, Jin and others terminated at least four video meetings hosted on Zoom’s networks commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, most of which were organized by and attended by U.S. based participants. Some of the participants who were unable to attend the meetings were Zoom customers in Queens and Long Island who had entered into service agreements government by Zoom’s terms of service.
Jin, officials of the PRC government, and others collaborated to identify meeting participants and to disrupt some of the meetings hosted on Zoom’s servers, at times creating pretextual reasons to justify their actions to other employees and executives of Zoom, as well as Zoo’s users themselves. In particularly, in May and June 2020, Jun, together with others, including others located in the PRC, acted to disrupt meetings held on Zoom to discuss politically sensitive topics by infiltrating the meetings to gather evidence about the purported misconduct occurring in those meetings. In fact, there was no misconduct; Jin and his co-conspirators fabricated evidence of TOS violations to provide pretexutal justification for terminating the meetings, as well as certain participants’ accounts. Jin then asked a high-ranking employee of Zoom in the United States (Employee-1) to effect the termination of meetings and the suspension and cancellation of user accounts.
– End of paraphrase –
So, who is Employee-1? It’s not Eric Yuan. And we know this because Eric Yuan exchanged electronic messages with Jin and Employee-1 regarding what is characterized as agreeing to provide PRC law enforcement with special
access to Zoom’s systems. This was in October 2019.
Whoever Employee-1 is, he got Employee-2 involved. Employee-2 got Jin direct access to Zoom’s U.S. based systems “so that Jin comply with instructions from the PRC government.”
Jin and Employee-1 were also communicating about these topics with Zoom’s COO and General Counsel.
It goes on and on, in rather extraordinary detail. The FBI affidavit is 47 dense pages.
I’m not sure how this affects the investing thesis, but I would say it is not good.
And, as should have been obvious from reading the initial story, it has nothing to do with a vengeful journalist.