LinkedIn was the only major social network in the United States that could operate in China. To do this, the professional Microsoft service censors messages made by its millions of Chinese users.
Now, it’s in hot water because it doesn’t censor enough.
China’s internet regulator this month rebuked LinkedIn leaders for not controlling political content. Three people told the story. While it is not clear exactly what materials the company was in trouble with, the regulator said that in the period around an annual meeting of Chinese lawmakers he had detected objectionable positions, said these people, who sought anonymity because the issue is not public.
As a punishment, LinkedIn is required to conduct a self-assessment and report to the Chinese cyberspace administration, the Internet regulator of China. The service was forced to suspend the new registration of users within China for 30 days, one of the people added, although that period could change in accordance with the government’s opinion.
The Chinese Cyberspace Administration did not immediately reply to a faxed comment request.
The presence of LinkedIn in China has long drawn interest across Silicon Valley as a potential way into the walled Internet of the country, home to the largest web users worldwide. The punishment highlights profound divisions in how the Internet should work between the US and China.
For years, the Government of China has blocked major U.S. services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google from controlling what they post. Critics in Washington say that such obstacles are symptomatic of China’s reluctance to more broadly follow global Internet and technology standards.
With more than 50 million members, LinkedIn’s Chinese service makes it vulnerable to tensions between the two power groups. Only weeks before Thursday’s scheduled meeting of Chinese and American officials in Alaska, Biden’s first face-to-face meeting took place with the regulator.
Competition in technology was one of the two countries’ main sticking points. The Biden Government has said that it will turn to allies to assist China in pressing technology policies that it considers unfair. Chinese officials have pushed for new technological autonomy plans, including the development of its own versions of everything from computer chips to jetliners.
Anxieties in Washington have recently been exacerbated by a hack that Microsoft recently linked to China aimed at companies and government agencies that use the email services of the company.
LinkedIn published a statement on March 9 that it “temporarily” stopped registering new users in China. “We are a global platform with a commitment to comply with the laws applicable to us and to comply with the Chinese government rules on our localized LinkedIn version of China,” said the statement.
Local Chinese companies are regularly subjected to similar scales, indicating how difficult it is to navigate an internet market with ever tighter speech controls. On the Chinese internet, a censor agreement does not guarantee smooth flow for any company, foreign company or local company.
When it announced that it would open a Chinese website almost seven years ago, LinkedIn drew curiosity from a US internet industry that has been forever banished by the Great Firewall of the country as Chinese censorship is nicknamed. LinkedIn has sold a stake to well-connected Chinese corporate capital partners and has committed itself to complying with local legislation and guidelines on censorship.
The company has used software algorithms and human reviewers to flag posts that may offend Beijing. Beijing. Users who disregard speech rules have generally received emails informing them that LinkedIn members in China can not view their message.
Its early efforts attracted ire from users whose content, although posted from outside the country, was blocked. However, contrary to their peers, LinkedIn remained in China and offered a seductive case study of market access.
This perseverance has not always been successful. LinkedIn struggled with WeChat, China’s ubiquitous chat and social media services, and remains a relatively small player.
The environment has also become harder. Since taking over the Communist Party in late 2012, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has carried out a series of online crackdowns. Moreover, Mr. Xi’s policies called for greater economic self-sufficiency and for a Western culture to be avoided, a blow to a service which has called for the integration of Chinese professionals into the world.
Mr. Xi chaired the rising power of the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, the LinkedIn regulator. It has become a de facto censorship department that carries censorship and complaints across the country’s internet and calls for censorship when companies miss something.
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