The videoconferencing app banned a Palestinian activist who is a member of a U.S.-designated terrorist group. Now, the company's policies are being questioned.

Transcript

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For people who talk to work colleagues by Zoom or use it to catch up with family and friends, it is easy to take the platform for granted. But Zoom will not host just any conversation. The video streaming platform is being accused of censorship after it blacklisted a controversial speaker at a public event. NPR's Bobby Allyn reports, and we should note Zoom is a financial supporter of NPR.

BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: The controversial speaker is Palestinian activist Leila Khaled. Khaled is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The U.S. considers it a terrorist group. Khaled is notorious for hijacking a plane in 1969 and trying to do it again a year later. So when Rabab Abdulhadi invited Khaled to speak, she knew it would set off a big debate. Abdulhadi, a professor at San Francisco State University, says it never happened because of Zoom. The company said there were legal concerns.

RABAB ABDULHADI: We might be implicated in criminal activities of material support for terrorism, and that might include imprisonment and a fine.

ALLYN: Abdulhadi didn't fear those consequences. She sees Khaled as a feminist icon who should be able to speak at a public event. Some 1,500 people had planned to tune in on Zoom.

ABDULHADI: As a platform, they do not have the right to use their being a platform in order for them to veto the content of our classroom and thus actually impinge on our academic freedom.

ALLYN: Legally, Zoom can't tell Abdulhadi what to teach. But it can kick speakers off its platform, and the pro-Israel Lawfare Project had been pressuring Zoom to do just that. Brooke Goldstein is the project's executive director.

BROOKE GOLDSTEIN: So if your interest is in having an academic discussion about controversial issues, go ahead. But that doesn't mean that you have the right to assist a designated terrorist group in carrying out their mission.

ALLYN: This wasn't the first time Zoom faced this kind of heat. This summer Zoom shut down meetings commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre at the request of the Chinese government. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been in the middle of debates over enforcing content rules for a while. For Zoom, it's new.

DAPHNE KELLER: Welcome to the party, Zoom.

ALLYN: Daphne Keller is a former Google lawyer who is now at Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Zoom started as a corporate video service, but now with the pandemic, millions of people use Zoom for everything - lectures, birthday parties, karaoke, weddings. Keller says that's forced them to set boundaries.

KELLER: Do we want Zoom to be the content police or the speech police? - because we're all so dependent on them. You know, they are functioning in a way that, for previous generations, the Postal Service or the phone company functioned.

ALLYN: Zoom may act like a phone company, but it isn't a utility. There's certain speech that can get it in legal trouble. Faiza Patel is with NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. She says with the endless flood of speech on the Internet, there have to be rules.

FAIZA PATEL: I think we're all kind of struggling to figure out how to maneuver in this space, which is quite different from what we've had before.

ALLYN: Patel says tech companies' terms of service usually say, we encourage free speech and debate. But censoring someone from actually speaking does challenge that.

PATEL: That obviously creates a question about, well, are you really allowing, you know, the full extent of the conversation?

ALLYN: Back at San Francisco State University, Abdulhadi is looking for an alternative to Zoom that doesn't, as she sees it, silence political speakers.

ABDULHADI: I mean, it's a very serious problem to be vulnerable to the only means of communications in today's pandemic times because what does this really mean for the future of education? What does this mean for the future of communication?

ALLYN: In a statement, Zoom says it supports academic freedom and the open exchange of ideas, but hosting someone linked to a terrorist group violates their terms of service.

Bobby Allyn, NPR News, San Francisco. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Tags: Leila Khaled  zoom