LinkedIn faces awkward selections in China

F.ORIGINAL INTERNET companies are having a hard time in China. In order to stop the spread of ideas it believes are dangerous, the Communist Party banned YouTube’s video platform, Facebook social network, and Twitter microblog in 2009. A year later, Google abruptly shut down its Chinese search engine after a dispute with the censors. Chinese people who want to access western social media have to do so through virtual private networks, which is tricky and can be illegal.

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One exception to this clumsy rule is LinkedIn. China’s government tolerates the professional network, perhaps because most people use it to look for jobs and business contacts rather than talk about democracy. The number of Chinese users of LinkedIn has grown rapidly to 53 million since Microsoft bought it in 2016. They account for about 7% of the global total of LinkedIn, up from 1.4% in 2014. Microsoft does not disclose how much China contributes to LinkedIn’s revenue, which reached $ 8 billion in 2020. Even so, the software giant can call it a rare western social network – networking profit in a market of nearly 1 billion netizens.

But acting in a dictatorship is a difficult choice for a platform for sharing ideas and business cards. In order to comply with Chinese law, LinkedIn must restrict what users can post. Since China’s cyberspace regulator criticized its lax controls in March, it appears to have stepped up those efforts. Many users have received notices that their profiles and activities in China are not being displayed. A Taiwan-based academic, J. Michael Cole, recently discovered that his profile was locked there. LinkedIn indicated the presence of sensitive content in the “Publications” section of its profile, but did not elaborate on it. Cole believes it might have something to do with references to books he wrote about Taiwan, which China claims as part of its territory.

Mr. Cole’s experience suggests a mystery to LinkedIn. Like other social media outlets Beijing tolerated, it must not allow certain words to appear on its service. But the rules are fuzzy, even for large internet platforms. If LinkedIn has received a list of supervisory authorities or has created an internal one, it does not pass it on. Liu Dongshu, a scholar on China’s internet policy at City University of Hong Kong, believes LinkedIn likely doesn’t have such a list, but instead censors some content that the Chinese government may find offensive on a case-by-case basis to avoid trouble. As a result, LinkedIn users are in a position not dissimilar to that of the social network itself: without explicit rules about what they can and can’t post in China, they have to guess like Mr Cole. This in turn can lead to self-censorship.

LinkedIn says it “has a duty to respect the laws that apply to us, including complying with Chinese government regulations.” When The Economist asked for the regulations that force it to block user profiles, the LinkedIn spokeswoman did not respond. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

All foreign firms face difficult compromises in China, which is both a huge market and an autocracy. Those with large Chinese holdings tend to line up. Apple, which makes and sells many iPhones in China, has removed sensitive programs from its Chinese app store. Companies with less exposure to China can go the big way. Facebook, Google and Twitter have reportedly threatened withdrawals from Hong Kong, which the Communist Party recently stepped up.

Microsoft sits somewhere in the middle. China is a source of grief for the company: from pirated Windows and Office software to raids on its offices by antitrust authorities. On July 19, America and several allies blamed China for a major hack into Microsoft’s Exchange email service. At the same time, many Chinese people are paying for their genuine goods – and Microsoft would no doubt want more of them to do so. It’s not breaking out in its Chinese sales, but the president said last year that they contributed less than 2% to global revenue. If that percentage is to grow, self-censorship on LinkedIn could be the price.

This article appeared in the business section of the print edition under the heading “LinkedOut”

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