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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

(playhearthstone.com)
2525 points hownottowrite | 1 comments | 08 Oct 19 09:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.214s | source
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alimbada ◴[08 Oct 19 11:24 UTC] No.21191021[source]▶
It's a shame but I feel like the majority of gamers won't care. They'll either be ignorant of this or they'll just shrug and continue playing. I boycotted Activision and by proxy Blizzard when Activision acquired them a long time ago but their continuing success shows I'm part of an extremely tiny minority.
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JumpCrisscross ◴[08 Oct 19 12:10 UTC] No.21191321[source]▶
> I feel like the majority of gamers won't care

The simultaneity of the NBA and now Blizzard so publicly siding with Beijing may elevate this out of the realm of commercial issues (subject to boycotts) into a political one.

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cabalamat ◴[08 Oct 19 12:23 UTC] No.21191430[source]▶
It should do. The West needs to decide whether it is going to stand for China being able to silence criticism of it in the West, or not.
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shadowgovt ◴[08 Oct 19 15:18 UTC] No.21193198[source]▶
Ironically, there's little the US government can do here without dragging things back towards the McCarthy era.

What would we have them do? Apply pressure to Activision/Blizzard to reverse the company's own internal policy on "keep politics out of the game stuff?" That's a pretty clear violation of freedom of speech, the press, and / or association, to tell a private company who they must endorse.

It's not unprecedented, but the precedents are very tightly bound (and often tied up in a justification based on use of very finite public resources, such as broadcast airwaves).

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tremon ◴[08 Oct 19 16:33 UTC] No.21194065[source]▶
What would we have them do?

Amend the constitution to provide first-amendment rights to all individuals instead of just citizens, for example. Then you can go back to claiming the moral high ground.

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1. shadowgovt ◴[08 Oct 19 16:43 UTC] No.21194171[source]▶
I believe the First Amendment already protects the free speech of non-citizens. Do you have a specific case in mind that broke differently?

https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/t-he-constitutional-rights...