[alpaca128]

"Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image will result in removal from Grandmasters and reduction of the player’s prize total to $0 USD [...]"

That's pretty close to "Blizzard can remove you from Grandmasters as soon as you open your mouth". Sad to see such a cowardice from corporations, although in the case of Blizzard it was kind of to be expected after all their visual modifications to Hearthstone in order to appeal to the chinese market.

[mlang23]

Isn't this basically the same with all big corporations these days? If you say unpopular things on your YouTube channel, you will be demonitized.as a way of punishment. In short, either you please big brother, or you will suffer.

[virgilp]

Is it a "big corporations" thing? Try saying e.g. that maybe Minsky was innocent, see how that works.

OTOH who knows anymore, maybe big corporations do have something to do with it.... it's certainly convenient. If you have money it's rather easy to summon a mob to do your bidding and silence inconvenient people, so they must love this new trend. Also if you have money and power, it's easy to get discretionary, arbitrarily-enforced rules to not apply to you. All these new trends are so much more convenient than the old "due process" thing....

[joelx]

I think we all need to boycott Blizzard and the NBA for putting money over freedom and democracy.

[hos234]

Big corps can't escalate things as a reaction or on a whim. They have much more to loose than a single protestor does. It has to be planned. Preferably with all other big corps in tow. Google tried and their market share went from 35% to 2%.

Now if they had got together with other corps, and drawn a line the story might have been different. That said, with each attempt comes learning and the next attempt wont go the same way.

The Chinese aren't immune to pressure (as the tariff wars show) and there are invisible lines in the sand, they can be pushed to step over that will unify opposition and escalate things.

Intelligent protest is about finding those lines.

[mlang23]

I agree with your analysis, but I dont agree with the motivations. The issue is forced growth. Why exactly is it so important for Google to have a market share in China? As if they aren't dominating the internet enough already. And because everyone buys the "we need endless growth"-myth, it is suddenly OK if Google sides with China because all they are doing is trying to grow. Aha. I tend to see things differently. They use the market share as an excuse to not care. As long as we put bussiness over everything, we can't really be surprised about corporations working against citizen rights.

[x220]

Yes, it is. I've heard many examples of youtube channels with mildly conservative political opinions getting ranked far lower than the youtube algorithm should rank them. Since youtube isn't transparent with its creators we have to speculate for ourselves. A lot of evidence points towards censorship.

[Iv]

I choose to believe that even big corporations can choose to have values.

I do believe we are entering in an age where reputation is going to be much more valuable to companies.

My ISP for 10 years is one that took some strong stances against censorship by doing things like mirroring wikileaks (back when it was cool) os supporting net neutrality.

I kinda put Google in a different basket for years because of their (initial? I think they changed?) refusal to censor search results in China.

And companies who submit to Chinese censorship, I want strictly nothing to do with.

[jug]

Eh, it's pretty much a given that a company won't tolerate using their games as platforms for politics or propaganda. I consider this no better than annoying spam and I'm happy they did it. I don't want to see it if I'm playing their games. I didn't sign up for that, so get it out. I don't care if it's politics that I support or not.

[BigJ1211]

Ironically refusing to speak can also mean that. If the rest of the players would refuse to speak at all (in interviews or whatever), they could still be banned for that.