People use this to rationalize continued involvement (often when it also happens to be profitable).
People can basically rationalize any bad behavior - it really seems like a skill that has no limits up to and including genocide.
In practice, I think the negative impact of helping to enable censorship for an authoritarian country outweighs whatever (likely zero) influence you’d believe you’d have.
Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away.
"Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away."
This is not a Google-like situation - for Zoom 'walking way' effectively means shutting down. They are very heavily Chinese based.
In the longer term, they could move operations, in which case the choice would be 'walk away from China' - but right now, it's more existential than that.
I don't think the good people have to do nothing, they can work to help users circumvent the firewall via things like tor.
It's really tempting to think that you're the good person helping in a messy situation (especially when it's also the easiest option to choose), but ultimately I think it's just rationalizing bad behavior.
I think most people believe they're 'good', even those doing the censorship in China do it under some belief that they're keeping stability and unity to prevent Trump like stupidity and western influence - or the rise of religious extremism. They're regular people doing regular jobs for something they think is good.
I think the actions matter, when you're doing bad things for some ambiguous influence I'm not sure how good you really are.
People can basically rationalize any bad behavior - it really seems like a skill that has no limits up to and including genocide.
In practice, I think the negative impact of helping to enable censorship for an authoritarian country outweighs whatever (likely zero) influence you’d believe you’d have.
Sometimes to be on the right side of history the right thing to do is to walk away.