It’s one thing to say you will censor, and another to actually do it.
LinkedIn has been learning that firsthand over the past day as it has come in for complaints from several users after it began blocking posts deemed sensitive by the Chinese government within the country ahead of the 25th Anniversary of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters.
In February, LinkedIn said it was applying to set up operations in China and would in turn censor some content within the country.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the time, LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner said the company expected “there will be requests to filter content,” adding, “we are strongly in support of freedom of expression and we are opposed to censorship…[but] that’s going to be necessary for us to achieve the kind of scale that we’d like to be able to deliver to our membership.”
The announcement at the time didn’t raise hackles, but now that the censorship has begun, the reality of his words is sinking in with users in China. Those affected aren’t happy.
In a Twitter post sent today and verified by The Wall Street Journal, Patrick Poon, a law student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he was “really shocked” to receive a notification from LinkedIn that a video he linked to on the social network expressing support for relatives and friends of those killed during the Tiananmen crackdown had been blocked within China.
The message from LinkedIn, which Poon provided to The Wall Street Journal, read, “we want to clarify that your activity is and has been visible globally, with the exception of the People’s Republic of China.
This is due to specific requirements within China to block certain content so that it does not appear on our network in the country.
The note offers some clarity on how LinkedIn plans to censor its network. In particular, it seems that messages posted from within China—or Hong Kong where Poon is located— will be visible only to LinkedIn users outside of mainland China.
That also seems to apply to those who first created accounts outside of China but are now operating within the country.
Fergus Ryan, the China correspondent for news site China Spectator, said he first created his LinkedIn account in 2006 in Australia, but two of his posts in recent days from within China were blocked, according to a notification he received from LinkedIn.
China Spectator is owned by News Corp., which owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Ryan said over the past two days he twice wrote on his LinkedIn feed about the arrest of Chinese-born Australian artist Guo Jian ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
He then received two messages indicating that the posts “contained content prohibited in China” and wouldn’t be displayed.
Ryan said he knows Mr. Guo personally and that the blocks from LinkedIn are preventing him from doing his job.
“I’m outraged by it,” he said in an interview, adding, “I think that my followers on LinkedIn would expect to receive information from me about what’s happening in China.
I think that LinkedIn needs to realize that in China, even more so than in other countries, when you want to talk about business, politics is unavoidable, they’re intertwined.”
In response to an inquiry about the recent censorship, LinkedIn spokesman Roger Pua said the company is “strongly in support of freedom of expression….[but] it’s clear to us that in order to create value for our members in China and around the world, we will need to implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content, when and to the extent required.”
He said the amount of LinkedIn information filtered in China is minuscule because the service doesn’t specialize in political topics.
Others, however, disagree. Shaun Rein, the head of consulting firm China Market Research Group, said LinkedIn is fundamentally misunderstanding the role it plays, not just as a professional network, but as a place where people show-off their knowledge and exchange ideas in order to market themselves.
Rein said he has posted regularly on LinkedIn for six years without incident but was flagged last week after posting an interview he did about the recent back-and-forth between China and the U.S. over cyberespionage.
Now before he can post to groups on LinkedIn, he must first get approval from the group’s moderator, he said. Mr. Rein’s firm has completed three projects for LinkedIn in the past.
“It’s going to hurt the user experience if they continue down this road, because people want to have unfettered discussions on LinkedIn,” he said.
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