After telling the world that it would donate masks, face guards and testing equipment to Italy, China quietly backtracked and sold the Mediterranean country desperately-needed medical equipment, according to a report.

What’s worse is that the personal protective equipment (PPE) China forced Italy to buy was actually the same PPE Italy donated to China before coronavirus rushed its own shores and killed nearly 16,000 people.

“Before the virus hit Europe, Italy sent tons of PPE to China to help China protect its own population. China then has sent Italian PPE back to Italy — some of it, not even all of it … and charged them for it,” a senior Trump administration official told The Spectator.

Beijing taking advantage of Italy’s generosity and then flipping it into something more sinister is just the latest example of the country’s misdeeds amid the global outbreak.

Thousands of other supplies and testing kits China has sold to other countries at marked-up prices have turned out to be defective.

Spain had to return 50,000 quick-testing kits to China after discovering they weren’t working properly. Last week, the Netherlands also rejected China-made coronavirus testing kits and protective gear, calling them substandard and questioning the quality of supplies Beijing is selling to the world.

Turkey, Georgia and the Czech Republic have also spoken out about kits it purchased from China as being less than adequate. In some cases, instead of fixing the issue, China has blamed user error.

The claims of faulty devices come as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths continue to surge around Europe and the United States, underscoring the dependence many countries have on Chinese imports.

“It’s so disingenuous for Chinese officials now to say we are the ones who are helping the Italians or we are the ones who are helping the developing world when, in fact, they are the ones who infected all of us,” the senior administration official said. “Of course they should be helping. They have a special responsibility to help because they are the ones who began the spread of the coronavirus and did not give the information required to the rest of the world to plan accordingly.”

The official said China’s decision to delay and suppress critical data has turned a bad situation worse.

On Thursday, Vice President Pence said that had China been truly transparent about COVID-19, there would be “no question” the world would have been in a better place to respond to the monster virus that has infected more than a million people and killed more than 70,000 worldwide.

“There’s simply no question that China’s lack of candor to the world impacted the way the world was able to respond,” Pence said.

In fact, as China downplayed the outbreak within its borders, nearly half a million people traveled to the United States, possibly carrying the virus with them.

“The disinformation that China has put out is crippling responses around the world,” the administration official said. “We were a month behind because the Chinese did not share information. It’s hard for the world to accept that even the information that they’re putting out now is accurate and acceptable from an epidemiological standpoint. We’re operating on some level with a hand tied behind our back.”

Einhorn, president of Brooklyn, New York-based Dealmed-Park Surgical, says the small quantities of critical medical supplies he has procured are sitting in warehouses for more than a week before they can get on cargo planes.

“We have to wait in line behind the yoga mat guy to get things shipped,” he said. “The highest priority for shipping should be to get medical equipment out–but it’s not.”

As the global coronavirus death toll crosses 10,000, countries are enacting emergency policies to get critical medical supplies, and many have desperately turned to China. The bottlenecks in production and cargo shipments are forcing governments and businesses to rethink their reliance on the country.

Einhorn says some of his Chinese suppliers have only begun ramping up production in recent days as factories came back online. The company is paying as much as $4,000 for a small pallet to be flown on commercial freight carriers such as DHL Worldwide Express, but it has been told products won’t get to the U.S. for as long as 10 days because of limited space.

“We have major health-care systems calling us, desperate to get supplies, and we have to tell them it’s going to be a long wait,” said Einhorn. “That’s contributing to the panic.”

Air-cargo capacity in China fell 40% from a year earlier between early February and early March, FedEx Corp. Chief Marketing Officer Brie Carere said this week. Since then, the company has seen a week-over-week rebound in air freight and its planes are flying full, she said, adding “we believe demand will stay elevated.” United Parcel Service Inc. declined to comment on its China operations.

Air cargo shipments have faced delays and limited capacity for weeks, according to Ker Gibbs, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. The suspension of commercial flights to China as the deadly coronavirus spread around the world also halted cargo transportation.

“When passengers flights are canceled, that also cancels the cargo those planes would have carried,” said Gibbs. “There is a bottleneck and limited capacity right now.”

Grounded Flights
Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. said on Friday that it will cut passenger capacity by 96% in coming months. That follows major airlines grounding planes. Europe’s biggest carrier Deutsche Lufthansa AG will idle 700 aircraft and 95% of seats, while American Airlines Group Inc. will park 450 aircraft.

Some airlines are weighing freight-only flights. British Airways owner IAG SA said that with passenger services severely restricted, it is operating a global network of cargo flights on passenger aircraft to keep vital supplies flowing.

For critical equipment like ventilators, governments are chartering planes or sending military aircraft. On Monday, Italy — which has had the most number of fatalities from the pandemic — sent a military plane to China to pick up the critical machines, said Wu Chuanpu, director of supply chain at Vedeng.com, one of the main Chinese platforms connecting medical equipment suppliers and buyers.

To alleviate shortages, governments are turning to extreme measures, including export bans and hoarding of critical equipment.

The European Union is restricting exports of essential medical supplies. U.S. President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act this week that gives the government more latitude in emergencies to direct industrial production.

The Federal Drug Administration warned of a shortage of masks and gowns, and urged health care providers to put strategies in place to conserve their use — including the reuse of surgical masks where possible.

In New York, the shortages have made Einhorn rethink his own supply chain. Dealmed is planning to relocate some production of masks to the U.S. and is looking into ordering equipment.

For now, he’s considering chartering a private cargo plane, and wishes the U.S. government would do more to help.

“They should look into how they get these supplies out of China,” said Einhorn. “Demand is crazy, and hospitals and doctors need them now.”

News assistants at The New York Times, Voice of America and two other outlets were dismissed from their positions and told to go home, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“China appears determined to crush the newsgathering operations of major U.S. outlets in Beijing, this time by taking punishing measures against local Chinese employees,” Steven Butler, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator said. “This action will not stop the ongoing tit-for-tat between China and the United States, and may escalate it. China should stop trying to control and intimidate foreign news bureaus and allow them to hire Chinese staff freely and directly.”

Butler said foreign bureaus in China are prohibited by law from hiring Chinese citizens as employees and “rely on personnel formally hired by the Personnel Service Corporation, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to the corporation’s website.

The Chinese staff, he added, “perform critical functions at foreign news outlets, providing language and research support.”

The move comes after China announced earlier in the week that it had given more than a dozen U.S. journalists from the Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine and Voice of America 10 days to leave Beijing.

China justified its actions as retaliation over new rules the Trump administration placed on Chinese reporters, including a 100 reporter cap from five state-run media outlets. The outlets had 160 reporters in total, meaning 60 will be sent back to China.

The tug-of-war shows just how frayed the relationship between the U.S. and China has gotten, despite signing phase one of a trade deal in January and President Trump’s repeated reassurances that China’s Communist leader, President Xi Jinping, is his friend.

That message apparently did not make it to the U.S. State Department or its Chinese counterpart.

Both took swipes at each other Friday on Twitter, blaming the other for creating and spreading the novel coronavirus that had infected 278,136 by Saturday morning. The U.S. has 19,624 confirmed cases of COVID-19 while China has 81,304. Italy tops the list of countries with the most deaths at 4,032. China comes in second at 3,259. The United States ranks 6th with 260 deaths.

On Friday, State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus tweeted that by Jan. 3, “Chinese authorities had already ordered #COVID19 virus samples destroyed, silenced Wuhan doctors, and censored public concerns online.” She added, “@SpokespersonCHN is right: This is a timeline the world must absolutely scrutinize.”

Her comments came after Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying tweeted that America was hellbent on blaming China. Hua slammed the United States, taunted the State Department and accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of lying on Fox News when he claimed China had allowed thousands of people to leave Wuhan and travel to places like Italy.

“Stop lying through your teeth! As WHO experts said, China’s efforts averted hundreds of thousands of infection cases,” the spokesperson tweeted.

Hua kept at it Saturday tweeting, “Lying and slander won’t make the US great, nor will it make up for the lost time. Facing the global pandemic, the right thing to do is put health ahead of public policy.”

While health experts in the US and elsewhere have stressed the global nature of the pandemic and sought to avoid blaming China, where the first coronavirus cases were detected, some in the Trump administration have pointed accusatory fingers.

Officials such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo, have taken to referring to the disease as the “Wuhan coronavirus”, in reference to the city in Hubei province where the first cases were concentrated.

President Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O’Brien was even more barbed.

“Rather than using best practices, this outbreak in Wuhan was covered up,” he said, speaking at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington DC. “There’s lots of open-source reporting from China, that the doctors involved were either silenced or put in isolation, or that sort of thing, so that the word of this virus could not get out. It probably cost the world community two months.”

China has said it is helping the international community.

UN Ambassador Zhang Jun told reporters in New York it had provided medical supplies to nations such as South Korea, Japan and Italy.

“We are sending medical teams to countries that need that, and we will do whatever to join the international community to fight this virus because we have only one world, we need to join hands, we need to show solidarity,” he said.

Republican senator Marco Rubio highlighted apparent threats from Beijing to cut off supplies of medicine to the US, amid anger by some to blame China for not acting quickly enough.

Speaking to Fox News, he pointed to an article in Xinhua, the state-run media agency, which noted Mr Trump had praised the efforts of Chinese president Xi Jinping to confront the illness.

But the article said initially the US’s reaction to China, including a travel ban, was “very unkind”.

“If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States. Then the United States will be caught in the ocean of new coronaviruses,” the article said.

“Also according to the US CDC officials, most of the drugs in the United States are imported…If China banned exports, the United States will fall into the hell of a new coronavirus pneumonia epidemic.”

It added: “We should say righteously that the US owes China an apology, the world owes China a “thank you”.”

Mr Rubio said we have been wrong to allow our medicine manufacturing capabilities to be moved offshore.

“[China] can threaten to cut us off from our pharmaceutical supplies, they could trigger a domestic problem here that would make it difficult or us to confront them,” he said. “It’s a tremendous amount of leverage.”

Health professionals, who depend on China for access to the country, have publicly praised Beijing for its response. On Capitol Hill, Robert Redfield, director of CDC said this week: “They really have now got control of their outbreak.”

Meanwhile, the state department has summoned the Chinese ambassador after a spokesperson with China’s foreign ministry suggested the US military might have brought coronavirus to Wuhan. More to come.

A Washington Post story last month described the plight of ethnic Uyghur from China’s western Xinjiang region, who were detained and sent to factories that produce athletic gear. A report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute also estimated that more than 80,000 Uyghur were sent to work in the supply chains of a range of well-known global brands including Nike “under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly criticized China for what the United Nations says is the detention of as many as 1 million mostly Uyghur Muslims. Nike has also become a target, with Vice President Mike Pence last year citing the company as an example of an American multinational “that willfully ignores the abuse of human rights” in China.

How China Is Defending Its Detention of Muslims to the World

China’s foreign ministry earlier this month called the reports about forced labor “simply baseless” and designed to “smear China’s counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang.” Late last year the government said it completed what it called de-radicalization training and that the “students” had all “graduated.”

In a statement on its website, Nike said that while it does not “directly source products from the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,” the company was looking into how suppliers rely on Uyghurs elsewhere.

“We have been conducting ongoing diligence with our suppliers in China to identify and assess potential risks related to employment of people from XUAR,” the company said. “Nike is committed to upholding international labor standards and we are continuing to evaluate how to best monitor our compliance standards in light of the complexity of this situation.”

The Beaverton, Oregon-based company said it’s working with trade groups such as the Retail Industry Leaders Association, American Apparel & Footwear Association and National Retail Federation, and stands behind a statement they released on Tuesday.

“As an industry representing brands and retailers, we do not tolerate forced labor in our supply chains,” the groups said in the letter.

A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute found that the Chinese government has “facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens” to factories across the country and forced them to work. These locations are in the supply chain of at least 83 companies — many of them technology behemoths.

The report states around 80,000 individuals were moved from the far west of Xinjiang to work in these forced labor camps. The majority of these people are Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in China that has undergone horrendous treatment.

They were transferred to the force labor camps between 2017 and 2019, as part of the Chinese government‘s “re-education” policy. This effectively includes ideological training, constant surveillance, and religious oppression.

Specifically, the tech companies named in the report are:

• Apple
• Huawei
• Amazon
• Samsung
• Microsoft
• ASUS
• Sony
• Dell
• Google
• HTC
• OPPO
• Oculus
• Acer
• Nintendo
• Nokia
• Sharp
• Siemens
• Toshiba
• Xiaomi
• Vivo
• Panasonic
• Cisco
• Hitachi
• ZTE
• Lenovo

How forced labor was involved in the components used by each of these companies varied, but the report outlined a few examples. One of them was the transfer of 1,200 Uyghurs to an O-Film factory in 2017.

This company manufactured the front-facing cameras for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. According to its website it also makes components for companies including Huawei, Lenovo, and Samsung.

What have the companies involved said?
Basically, a lot of nothing words jumbled together to the effect of: We are opposed to forced labor camps and will look into this matter

It’s what Microsoft told Vice, and it’s what Apple told the Washington Post. Is this method of responding a surprise? No, it’s straight out of the PR playbook: Don’t take responsibility and promise vague, positive action.

Thing is — this is hardly the first time a big tech company has been found using human rights-abusing factories. In fact, if you do a quick Google search looking for “sweatshops technology” you’ll find an incredible amount of forced labor camps in the industry; a trend going back years and years.

At this point, there’s really only one conclusion: Big tech companies don’t care.

Until they’re found out by investigations like this or from whistleblowers, they’re happy to use the cheapest labor available and keep their stockholders happy with increased profits.

Please, prove me wrong. I’m waiting.

What can be done about the forced labor camps?
Here we reach one of the biggest issues. Look again at that list of companies. If you’re going to partake in the modern world — which, for most of us, isn’t really an option — you’re going to encounter a product from one of those organizations. And, believe me, if these companies are involved in forced labor camps, expect unlisted businesses to be implicated too.

This means if you love gadgets you’re, morally, kinda fucked. Which, as a gadget-lover and reviewer, is depressing as hell.

This leads to a simple question: What can we actually do?

The report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has a long list of suggestions (scroll down to the “Recommendations” part of the report on the right hand sidebar), but these can be summarized to “put pressure on the Chinese government.” I have my doubts on how well that works.

We could also consider not buying some of these products, but due to the nature of late capitalism — that’s not really achievable. Yes, we can try and not buy as many pointless gadgets, but it’s tough to exist in the current world without, say, a smartphone or computer — let alone thrive.

Also, this argument buys into a PR technique companies use (especially when it comes to the climate crisis) to absolve themselves from responsibility. You know, it’s as though they’re saying “it’s you, the people, who need to change, we’re just giving you what you want.”

Which is all sorts of bullshit.

My belief is that forced labor (or “re-education) camps in the technology space need to be fought with regulation. The clearest way of achieving this is simply delivering huge fines to companies caught using these practices. Just see how long hardware makers continue to use sweatshops after they’re hit with a fine big enough to reverse the savings they made at a human cost.

And if a fine doesn’t work? Put some of the company’s executives in prison.

Is there another way?
One option is to concentrate on making devices less disposable. The idea being, if you can reduce the yearly churn of new devices, you can ease the burden on factories and the need to create forced labor camps.

The EU in particular has been active when it comes to reducing the impact of the device cycle — although not specifically for the reasons of modern slavery.

One example is the organization looking into forcing phone makers to include replaceable batteries in handsets. Another is its fight with Apple over standardizing cables. There’s not a huge leap from this to “right-to-repair” legislation, which would help reduce device churn.

And, because the EU is so large, Americans would likely benefit from these changes too — as it wouldn’t be cost-effective to make two completely different devices for the markets.

Would this automatically solve forced labor camps? Of course not, but it’s a step away from our current system that requires a never-ending manufacturing cycle.

Realistically, businesses are never going to stop using sweatshops because all they really care about is making money — no matter what their marketing materials will have you believe. But there is a real human cost to this.

Of course, as individuals we can be aware and make changes where we can. But never forget that it’s the companies themselves supporting and spreading this methodology. And the only way to stop this human abuse is to hit them in the only place they care about: Their bank accounts.

How? Fine companies who use sweatshops so hard, they never make the same mistake again, and put the executives responsible behind bars.

Months earlier, at the request of the Chinese government, Shutterstock had begun censoring a few searches by users based in China for politically volatile subjects like “Taiwan flag.”

Shutterstock employees who disagreed with the blacklist on free speech grounds kept asking about it at every big internal meeting. So, that day, Pavlovsky told them they were free to seek jobs elsewhere.

“The beauty of where we live and where we work is that we’re free to make those choices,” Pavlovsky told employees at the meeting at Shutterstock’s offices, according to a recording of the meeting posted to a company internal website and heard by NBC News.

“And so, you know, it’s a great market,” he continued, “and employees have a lot of opportunities to work here, to work elsewhere, and we are very supportive when employees do not feel that this is the right place for them, to pursue other opportunities.”

The reaction was shock for the more than 180 Shutterstock employees — about 20 percent of the company — who had signed a petition opposing the Chinese request even at the risk of the company’s losing access to a potentially lucrative market, according to an employee who said they were at the meeting.

“Several people were like, ‘Whoa, he just told us all to quit?'” said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity fearing possible retaliation.

It was a sign that a monthslong uproar at Shutterstock — a small, tightly knit company known for its cache of offbeat, extremely specific stock photos and video — wasn’t fading away, reflecting broader conflicts swirling around tech companies, free speech and worker activism.

Shutterstock declined to comment on the internal recording specifically. In a statement to NBC News on Wednesday, however, Pavlovsky expressed similar sentiments. He said the company welcomes all voices and opinions from employees on a variety of topics and that it also respects employees who decide to leave the company after a fundamental disagreement.

“While a small group of employees expressed concern for this matter, many others have proactively communicated their appreciation for our handling of the topic and that they understood our decision,” he said.

On average, Americans probably see Shutterstock’s photos more than they realize. Founded in 2003 in the wake of the first internet bubble, the site provides an essential service to online journalists and advertisers by giving them a way to illustrate stories and advertisements. It recorded $651 million in sales last year, competing with the likes of Getty Images and Adobe Stock, and it paid a worldwide network of photographers for their work.

Similar scenes of worker unrest have played out in many U.S. tech companies as the dream of expansion to China and its growing market has run into the reality of employees who are increasingly wary of the tools they’re being asked to build.

While the tension has played out publicly at major tech companies, including Google and Facebook, it’s something that even Shutterstock, an under-the-radar company by tech standards, is having to face.

But companies have also grown more comfortable telling employees that they will have to learn to accept certain decisions. The heads of Microsoft and Amazon have pushed back on some employee efforts to abandon projects on ethical grounds, while Google has fired some employees who were workplace organizers, accusing them of misusing company resources.

“We really had very few brushes with these sorts of ethical problems in the past,” said Stefan Hayden, a software engineer who left Shutterstock in December. He said he lost trust in its management over its decision to filter China searches and what he described as the secrecy around it. He worked there for nine years, more than half of Shutterstock’s existence.

At least two more employees have left Shutterstock in protest of the company’s not making more of a stand on human rights, Hayden and a current employee said, bringing the total number of departures to three. More employees are considering doing the same, two current employees said. The company has more than 1,000 employees, according to its most recent annual report.

“People feel management doesn’t listen to them,” a current employee said, expressing fear of retaliation for speaking publicly.

“By helping the Chinese government, we’re an enabler, and that’s something that really bothers me,” the employee said, citing China’s record on human rights, including its widely condemned treatment of ethnic Uighurs.

Shutterstock has endured an up-and-down existence since its stock began trading publicly in 2012. The company offers photographers a platform on which they can earn money by uploading photos, and in December it announced that it had paid out $1 billion to its contributors — a landmark it celebrated the day Pavlovsky spoke about people being free to leave.

But the company has faced challenges. Most recently, it reported a 63 percent decrease in net income for 2019 compared to the year before, to go with 4 percent revenue growth. The company said in its fourth-quarter earnings statement that rising marketing expenses, including in cybersecurity and data science, were the cause of the shortfall.

Pavlovsky, who was the chief operating officer, has been promoted since the December meeting. Shutterstock said this month that he’ll be elevated to CEO in April, succeeding the company’s founder, Jon Oringer, who was one of New York’s first tech billionaires.

Heidi Garfield, Shutterstock’s general counsel, said in an interview that the company doesn’t want employees to leave over the China issue or any other similar disagreement.

“It’s important to us that we have diverse views, and that diversity of thought is generally quite beneficial for the company,” Garfield said. She said she disagrees with the idea that Shutterstock is pushing out employees who have a difference of opinion.

Oringer has defended the Chinese filtering in a memo to employees, arguing that the downside is outweighed by the benefit of providing up to 1.3 billion Chinese users with access to the vast majority of the company’s material. Shutterstock says it has 310 million images on file. (The company has confirmed the authenticity of Oringer’s memo.)

China has used its economic leverage to pressure even powerful American institutions like the NBA and Hollywood film studios to censor themselves, and Google has reportedly considered returning to the Chinese market with a censored search engine, sparking employee protests and resignations. Google said this week that it has no plans to launch the project and that no work is being done on it currently.

The Shutterstock situation provides a glimpse of how pressure from China can be subtle.

Shutterstock’s road to China began around 2014, when the company struck a deal with the Chinese social network ZCool Network Technology to exclusively distribute Shutterstock images. It was a foothold in a potentially huge market, and Shutterstock invested $15 million in ZCool in 2018.

Last fall, employees at ZCool gave Shutterstock “feedback” that there was a Chinese government request to block politically sensitive searches, Garfield said. She said she never saw a demand in writing but considered it to be a lawful request.

Authorities in Beijing met with executives at ZCool’s offices “a number of times” to discuss the issue, a Shutterstock spokesperson said.

The request was to create a blacklist of six banned terms, current and former Shutterstock employees said: “President Xi,” “Chairman Mao,” “Taiwan flag,” “dictator,” “yellow umbrella” and “Chinese flag,” as well as variations of them. (Yellow umbrellas were a symbol of street protests in 2014.) Shutterstock confirmed the list.

Searches within China for those terms would produce zero results, even if Shutterstock might have thousands of relevant photos or videos.

But the request quickly ran into a problem: The small circle of software engineers who worked on Shutterstock’s search tool hesitated, worried about setting a precedent for censorship.

For one of the engineers, the request was personal, three current and former employees said. One of the people who might be tasked to write the lines of computer code that would carry out the order, a Chinese national, asked not to work on the project, the three sources said.

“Even from the beginning, there was a kerfuffle about who exactly was going to do this work,” Hayden said.

By mid-September, word spread within the company as more people were copied on emails about the project, leading upper management to make a statement to Shutterstock’s engineering group, Hayden said. On the company’s internal Slack messaging system, a new channel was created where employees questioned the management’s reasoning, he said.

But executives’ answers only seemed to inflame concerns, as days later employees began drafting a petition opposing censorship, Hayden said in an account that other former and current employees confirmed.

The internal petition is an increasingly common way for workers at tech companies to get the attention of their managers. And Shutterstock employees said that to write it, they looked for inspiration to their counterparts at Google, who wrote a petition in fighting a censored search engine in China.

“By complying, we are enabling injustices, including the discrimination of the people of Hong Kong, the suppression of Chinese political dissent, and undermining the sovereignty of Taiwanese people,” read the Shutterstock petition, first reported by The Intercept. “This first step of building search filters lays open the door to more types of discrimination in the future.”

In early October, Shutterstock was scheduled to hold a quarterly meeting with employees where, as often happens at tech companies, senior executives respond to questions that might come their way.

With employees gathered in the company’s New York City headquarters, the question of the China policy quickly came up, according to Hayden and two current employees. Executives stood by their decision and were noncommittal about what came next: Shutterstock wouldn’t agree to all future censorship requests, and it would evaluate them on a case-by-case basis, weighing the costs and benefits in each case, the three people said.

To some employees, that was the problem: Shutterstock hadn’t made the right decision the first time around, so how could it be trusted to do so in the future?

“Where was the line? If the Chinese government asked for the name and contact information for a contributor who was posting inflammatory things, would they give it to them?” one employee said later.

Hayden said he didn’t hear any willingness on the part of the company to compromise, and he decided that was too large a breach for him to repair.

“One of the answers we got was that our CEO wants to move on from this topic,” he said. “That’s when I thought, ‘OK, I’ll physically move on from the company.'” He said he began searching for a job and found one about a month later.

“It’s his company. He can do whatever he wants with it,” Hayden said of Oringer, the outgoing CEO, who says he remains Shutterstock’s largest shareholder. “But if he wants people to be happy to work there, there has to be some sort of compromise.” Oringer didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment.

The code was written eventually, and the blacklist was put in place. But more than two months after the petition began circulating, executives were still being pressed on the issue — to management’s apparent frustration.

“The culture that we want to build is also one where when leadership makes a decision, we move on. We commit, and we move on,” Pavlovsky said at the Dec. 10 internal meeting.

Pavlovsky didn’t respond to an emailed interview request, but in his statement Wednesday he echoed his earlier statement: “As a transparent organization, one of our core practices is that once we’ve had an open and honest conversation on a topic, then we commit and move on.”

Chris MacAskill, a co-founder of the photo service SmugMug, said the entire tech sector is wrestling with the limits of the internet to expand freedom of expression, especially as once-small companies grow.

“The big social networks were all started for the most part by young programmers who had a little bit of a libertarian bent,” MacAskill said. “The mantra was ‘free speech’ and ‘we’re going to liberate the world with free speech.’ And as the companies have grown up, they’ve just had to face reality.”

Getty Images, which competes with Shutterstock, also distributes material in China through a local partner company, VCG. A search of VCG for “Taiwan flag” produces zero results. Getty spokesman Matt McKibben declined to comment on whether it has received censorship demands from the Chinese government.

Adobe Stock, another competitor, is available in China, and a search on its site in China by NBC News also found zero results for “Taiwan flag.” Adobe spokeswoman Anais Gragueb had no immediate comment on the company’s censorship practices.

Current and former Shutterstock employees said a main point of frustration remains how little information the company is willing to share, such as how often it receives government orders. Larger tech companies, including Facebook and Google, regularly publish transparency reports laying out where and how often governments ask the company to take down or block content.

Garfield, Shutterstock’s general counsel, said the company would consider publishing a similar report, but she said it might not have the staff to do so. “I certainly think that resources are an important consideration for us,” she said.

The list of banned Chinese search terms hasn’t grown beyond the original list of six, Garfield said, and she said any future request would go through the same internal process of determining, first, whether the request was lawful and, second, what its impact would be on Shutterstock’s employees, investors, contributors and other affected parties.

“I don’t think it sets a precedent,” she said of the China policy. “From my perspective, compliance can take many forms in many different countries.”

Shutterstock regularly receives takedown notices from more than 20 countries, not including requests related to intellectual property, the spokesperson said. The countries are primarily in Europe, Australia and North America, with some in South America, and the company addresses hundreds or sometimes thousands of requests a year.

In December, after months of internal debate over China, Shutterstock faced another international content question when Russia blocked its domains over a picture of a miniature Russian flag planted in a pile of feces. Shutterstock limits flag photos by its own worldwide terms and eventually removed the image, but not before expressing regret for not having acted “in a timely manner.”

Pavlovsky has since begun holding “office hours” each week for employees who might wish to be heard one on one on any subject, one of the current employees said.

Another Shutterstock employee expressed doubt that the company would take many more steps toward transparency.

“Nothing I’ve seen up to this point has assured me we would be any less hasty and secretive in the future,” the employee said.

The game shot to the top of the charts in the coronavirus-plagued country and gained widespread popularity elsewhere as people sought a diversion — albeit a macabre one — during the real-life epidemic.

“This situation is completely out of our control,” said developer and publisher Ndemic Creations, which sought to contact the Cyberspace Administration of China to work toward a resolution, according to Reuters.

Ndemic said it was unclear if the cyberspace watchdog’s decision was related to the deadly outbreak, which began in the city of Wuhan in December.

“We have a huge amount of respect for our Chinese players and are devastated that they are no longer able to access and play Plague Inc.,” Ndemic added, according to Agence France-Presse.

The game, which was released in 2012, has more than 130 million players, the company said.

The Chinese regulator and Apple did not respond to requests from Reuters and AFP for comment.

Ndemic said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had recognized the simulation game as an educational tool.

Daniel Ahmad, an analyst with gaming research company Niko Partners, told Reuters that “the game may have simply been taken down due to sensitivities around the topic and gameplay of the title given the recent COVID-19 outbreak.”

Ahmad added that it might be related to a new feature in the game that allows players to create “fake news” stories about the pathogen.

He said he didn’t believe the game’s removal was tied to a new update by Apple that requires developers of revenue-generating games on its Chinese site to obtain a license from the Chinese government since other unlicensed games had not been affected.

Players took to social media to slam the decision to pull the game.

“I’ve played Plague Inc for so long, I’m so angry! It taught us to wash hands frequently and protect ourselves… Honestly, I learned a lot about infectious diseases from this game,” one wrote on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, according to AFP.

Apple has removed an app from its Hong Kong app store that residents used to help avoid tear gas hours, after Chinese officials criticized the company.

The company claimed it made the decision to remove the HKMap.live app on Thursday because it was being used to “target and ambush police.” But the makers of the app say there is “zero evidence” to back up this claim, and that the app was primarily used by residents to stay safe and avoid tear gas.

The decision to remove the app puts Apple on a growing list of U.S. companies, including the NBA, Blizzard and Tiffany, that have kowtowed to Chinese pressure over Hong Kong in order to avoid sanctions from Beijing.

HKMap.live crowdsourced the location of police and anti-government protesters. It was initially rejected by Apple but the company reversed that decision on Oct. 4, with the app going live on the App Store a day later.

The app, which was available in the Hong Kong version of the App Store but not the Chinese version, quickly became Hong Kong’s most downloaded app in the travel category.

On Wednesday, Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily hit out at Apple in a piece titled: “Protecting rioters – Has Apple thought clearly about this?”

“Allowing the ‘poisonous’ app to flourish is a betrayal of the Chinese people’s feelings [and allowed] Hong Kong rioters to openly commit crime while openly escaping arrests,” the editorial said, without naming the app specifically.

Within hours, Apple responded.

“We have verified with the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau that the app [HKmap.Live] has been used to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement. This app violates our guidelines and local laws, and we have removed it from the App Store,” the company said in a statement to VICE News.

The makers of the app, who have remained anonymous to protect themselves, slammed Apple for its decision, saying there is “zero evidence” to back up the claims by the Hong Kong authorities that the app was used “to target and ambush police, threaten public safety, and criminals have used it to victimize residents in areas where they know there is no law enforcement.”

The developers pointed out that moderators deleted any user-generated content that solicited, promoted, or encouraged criminal activity and that repeat offenders were banned from the platform. The HKMap.live website remains accessible on iPhones.

“We once believed the app rejection is simply a bureaucratic f-up, but now it is clearly a political decision to suppress freedom and human right in #HongKong,” the developers tweeted.

But the removal of the HKMap.live app isn’t the only action Apple has taken at the request of the Chinese government this week.

The company also removed the Quartz app from its Chinese app store and deleted the Taiwan flag emoji from iPhone keyboards for Hong Kong users in its latest software update.

Critics claim companies like Apple are simply bowing to Chinese pressure because they are worried about the possible loss of revenue caused by angering Beijing.

The NBA has distanced itself from the tweet sent by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey showing support of the protests after Chinese authorities reacted angrily. Games studio Blizzard banned a Hong Kong-based player of its popular game Hearthstone game after he said: “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” in a live-streamed interview. And Tiffany removed a tweet showing a model covering one eye, thought to be a gesture of solidarity with Hong Kong demonstrators.

“History will remember all this groveling to authoritarians,” Zeynep Tufekci, a writer who is chronicling the protests in Hong Kong, said on Thursday.

He appeared on the screen in the gas mask and goggles typical of demonstrators in Hong Kong, who wear gear to protect themselves from tear gas and shield their identities from the government.

“Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!” he yelled in Mandarin, as the two interviewers ducked down to hide their faces from the camera and avoid being associated with his political statement.

It was a costly bit of protest.

Blitzchung, whose real name is Ng Wai Chung, was supposed to collect $10,000 in award money for his participation in the Hearthstone Grandmasters competition. Instead, Blizzard Entertainment, the unit of Santa Monica-based gaming giant Activision Blizzard that runs the global competition, kicked him out of the tournament, revoked his prize winnings and banned him from Hearthstone esports for a year, all for expressing support for the pro-democracy protests currently roiling Hong Kong.

Ng, who lives in Hong Kong, declined an interview with The Times, saying he was overwhelmed by media requests. He told the gaming site IGN he expected the punishment and did not regret his protest. “I think it’s unfair, but I do respect their decision,” he said.

It’s only the latest example of an American company scrambling to rein in speech that rankles the Chinese government. From the National Basketball Assn. to Nike to Paramount Pictures, U.S. businesses are increasingly at pains to avoid any flare-ups that might cost them access to what will soon be the world’s largest consumer market.

Blizzard is facing a swell of criticism for the decision, on Twitter and Reddit as well as from elected officials.

“Blizzard shows it is willing to humiliate itself to please the Chinese Communist Party. No American company should censor calls for freedom to make a quick buck,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) tweeted.

Blizzard’s decision highlights the dependence of multinational businesses, including sports businesses, on China, said Clayton Dube, the director of the University of Southern California’s U.S.-China Institute. As companies have grown accustomed to making money in China, they have proven more wiling to accommodate demands of the Chinese government in order to stay in its good graces.

“The rules set at the top within China are trickling into these businesses outside of China … it shows how global these businesses have become and how important China’s market is to the bottom line,” he said.

Blizzard was careful to portray its decision as a matter of rule-enforcement rather than a concession to China.

“After an investigation, we are taking the necessary actions to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future,” Blizzard said in a statement. Blizzard rules about tournament and player conduct prohibit participants from “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.”

But on Chinese microblogging site Weibo, the official account of Hearthstone reposted Blizzard’s statement in Chinese — with a significant change. “We will, as always, resolutely safeguard the country’s dignity,” it added.

Todd Harper, professor at the University of Baltimore’s program in Simulation and Digital Entertainment, was among those dismayed by Blizzard’s decision. That the policy is so broad and open to interpretation is concerning but not unusual, he said, notingthat most esports players face strict contracts and tournament rules. It’s the selective enforcement of such policies that is the real problem, he said.

“‘Overwatch’ players who make money streaming themselves playing might make a racist comment or use a homophobic slur, but the scale of punishment for those offenses doesn’t come close to this level of penalty,” Harper said. And racist and homophobic comments are “more culturally troubling, so Blizzard’s response is very telling and kind of sad.”

The esports market in China is considerably larger than in the United States. While video game industry consultant Mike Vorhaus said that roughly 10 million to 40 million in the U.S. watch esports, that number is easily 100 million in China. He said the industry was big in Korea and China before it caught on in the U.S.

“I think it’s very safe to assume publishers are much more sensitive to what’s happening in China than they are in other countries. It’s a huge market, and if you want to be there — no pun intended — you better play the game the PRC government wants,” Vorhaus said.

China nurtured homegrown companies that built separate search engines, phones and other digital infrastructure for the country and has long blocked easy access to Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that provide global reach. But gaming companies hosting multinational esports tournaments provide a rare space where that bifurcation between China and the rest of the internet is less pronounced, Dube said.

But Chinese gaming is heavily monitored by the government, Dube said. Visuals go through extensive vetting — while a character in a video game might look one way in the U.S., it might look completely different in China.

The Los Angeles Times previously reported that Tencent, a Chinese tech giant that owns Santa Monica-based Riot Games, built a system to track how much time individual gamers in China spent playing “League of Legends” and automatically lock out those who stayed on more than two hours per day. The move came as the company faced increasing pressure from Chinese state media and regulators for its role in a supposed video game addiction epidemic.

Activision Blizzard joins a number of international companies finding themselves embroiled in controversy around free speech linked to China. Luxury brands including Versace, Coach and Givenchy have all fallen afoul of Beijing’s demands to refer to both Hong Kong and Taiwan as parts of its territory and not suggest they are independent.

Even tech titan Huawei Technologies Co., a national darling, found itself under fire for the way it represented Taipei in its phone software. During the summer, China also requested more than 40 foreign airlines stop referring to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries.

Most recently, China’s state media halted NBA broadcasts after Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted an image supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, causing a swell of controversy.

The NBA has sought to expand in China since the 1992 Olympics, and the Rockets have been among the most popular teams in the country since they drafted Yao Ming in 2002. The NBA attempted to distance itself, with Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta tweeting that the general manager “doesn’t speak for the Houston Rockets” and that the Rockets are “not a political organization.”

An official statement acknowledged Morey’s statement had “deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.” The translated statement posted on Weibo said the league was “greatly disappointed” at Morey’s “inappropriate speech.”

An episode of “South Park” from last week that mocked Chinese censorship was wiped from big platforms in China. While the NBA met with outrage for its weak tone, garnering accusations that it cared more about preserving its business in China than upholding free speech values, “South Park’s” creators responded cheekily: “Like the N.B.A. we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy.”

There’s a lot at stake for Activision Blizzard, which has tie-ups with Chinese gaming houses Tencent Holdings Ltd. and NetEase Inc. to distribute — and in some cases co-develop — new entries in beloved franchises such as “Call of Duty” and “Diablo” in the world’s biggest video game market.

Blizzard’s partial ownership by Tencent creates pressure to self-police, said Eric Harwit, a professor at the University of Hawaii in Manoa whose work focuses on the spread of communications technologies in East Asia. Tencent has a lucrative contract with the NBA for streaming in China, which it temporarily suspended after the recent controversy.

“Tencent has already been eager to show they are not happy to have anyone associated with them align with the Hong Kong protesters,” Harwit said.