LinkedIn Censors More Journalist Profiles in China, Suggests Self-Censorship as Solution

Using methods that include censoring posts, hiding or deleting profiles and proposing that users practice self-censorship, LinkedIn continues to cleanse its Chinese platform for the benefit of the CCP. This week, several Western journalists and academics took to Twitter to share notifications from LinkedIn stating that their profiles had been removed from the Chinese version of the site due to unspecified “prohibited content.” Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, a China reporter at Axios whose profile was recently censored, wrote a Twitter thread detailing the situation:

While this is not the first time LinkedIn has censored profiles in China, these recent notifications point to the company’s increasing potential to export China’s censorship demands beyond the Great Firewall. Allen-Ebrahimian drew attention to the fact that correspondence from LinkedIn clearly placed the onus on her to make her content available on the Chinese platform: “[…] the decision whether to update your profile is yours,” the message stated. As this would force her to delete the sensitive content on her own end, as opposed to merely having it removed from the Chinese version, she concluded, “This goes beyond China’s model of ‘internet sovereignty’ and imposes China’s censorship extraterritorially.” LinkedIn’s suggestions to self-censor resemble censorship messages from Weibo, which recommend that users “refrain from posting or forwarding similarly sensitive content…to avoid disruptions to the normal functioning of [their] account.”