LinkedIn Considers Changes After China Censorship Revealed

LinkedIns censorship practices in China were brought into the open Monday after a Shanghai-based journalist released an email from the company notifying him that one of his articles would be blocked in the Communist state.

The June email to Rob Schmitz, a reporter for Marketplace.org, showed how LinkedIn is deciding what to censor based on guidelines handed down by Chinese officials.

The email revealed another little-known LinkedIn policy: Content prohibited in China that is posted from within China is censored everywhere in the world not just in China.

A LinkedIn spokesman said the policy was designed to protect people in China from retribution from government officials, who might notice the content outside China.

The spokesman said LinkedIn is considering changing the policy, which has been criticized by human-rights groups.

The incident highlights the challenges for social networks in the worlds most populous country, where media are strictly controlled. Facebook does not offer its main service in China, and maintains only a small ad-sales office there.

When LinkedIn launched its China site in February, CEO Jeff Weiner said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that some content might be censored, and that he wasnt sure how the censorship would work.

We are strongly in support of freedom of expression and we are opposed to censorship but recognize that in order to obtain a license [in China], there will be requests to filter content and thats going to be necessary for us to achieve the kind of scale that wed like, he said at the time.

The LinkedIn spokesman said the company did not receive a request from China to censor content until June, more than three months after it launched there. The request, which listed several specific areas LinkedIn was instructed to ban from its site in China, coincided with the 25th anniversary of the Chinas bloody suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The LinkedIn spokesman would not specify the taboo subjects.

According to Schmitz, LinkedIn in June blocked an article he posted to the network about the anniversary. He said LinkedIn also blocked another article, by a journalist for The Australian, about Guo Jian, a Tiananmen Square protester and artist detained by Chinese officials shortly before the anniversary.

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LinkedIn Considers Changes After China Censorship Revealed