Scholars on LinkedIn Are Being Blocked in China 'Without Telling Them Why' (wsj.com) 62
Affected users say social-networking site owned by Microsoft is obstructing them over 'prohibited content' without further explanation. From a report: Eyck Freymann, an Oxford University doctoral student, was surprised to get a notice from LinkedIn this month telling him his account had been blocked in China. The "Experience" section of his profile, which detailed his career history, contained "prohibited" content, he was informed. The social-networking site owned by Microsoft didn't explain more, but Mr. Freymann said he thought it was because he had included the words "Tiananmen Square massacre" in the entry for his two-year stint as a research assistant for a book in 2015. "LinkedIn is pulling people's material off without telling them why," he said. "It was surprising because I am just a graduate student. I didn't think I would have mattered."
The academic is one of a spate of LinkedIn users whose profiles have been blocked in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal identified at least 10 other individuals who had their profiles blocked or posts removed from the China version of LinkedIn since May, including researchers in Jerusalem and Tokyo, journalists, a U.S. congressional staffer and an editor based in Beijing who posted state media reports about elephants rampaging across China. A LinkedIn spokeswoman said in a statement that while the company supports freedom of expression, offering a localized version of LinkedIn in China means adherence to censorship requirements of the Chinese government on internet platforms. The company didn't comment on whether its actions were proactive or in response to requests from Chinese authorities. LinkedIn made a trade-off to accept Chinese censorship when it entered China in 2014 and has typically censored human-rights activists and deleted content focused on posts deemed sensitive to the Chinese government. The recent dragnet stands out for having caught several academics in its path, resulting in the deletion of entire profiles instead of individual posts.
The academic is one of a spate of LinkedIn users whose profiles have been blocked in recent weeks. The Wall Street Journal identified at least 10 other individuals who had their profiles blocked or posts removed from the China version of LinkedIn since May, including researchers in Jerusalem and Tokyo, journalists, a U.S. congressional staffer and an editor based in Beijing who posted state media reports about elephants rampaging across China. A LinkedIn spokeswoman said in a statement that while the company supports freedom of expression, offering a localized version of LinkedIn in China means adherence to censorship requirements of the Chinese government on internet platforms. The company didn't comment on whether its actions were proactive or in response to requests from Chinese authorities. LinkedIn made a trade-off to accept Chinese censorship when it entered China in 2014 and has typically censored human-rights activists and deleted content focused on posts deemed sensitive to the Chinese government. The recent dragnet stands out for having caught several academics in its path, resulting in the deletion of entire profiles instead of individual posts.
LinkedIn... (Score:5, Insightful)
LinkedIn...I report scams I get, Microsoft's LinkedIn investigates, and then in 3-hours I get the "this scammer did nothing wrong." But the scammers buy a full profile, I haven't and Microsoft is always been a GTF$.
So being blocked, banned, to please a totalitarian regime for company profit is no surprise. Users forget all these sites that are about posting content, it is not an open forum. If Microsoft, Google, Engulf and Devour decided to block you're blucked. :(
No explanation? 'nuff said. Then the matter is hopefully, quietly dropped.
JoshK.
P.S. I won't be surprised if my profile is deleted.
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Don't waste your time trying to police Microsoft's network for them.
I use LinkedIn for recruitment, nothing else. Never read anyone's posts, never post anything myself.
Microsoft getting away with murder again. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason why Microsoft gets away with both metaphorical and literal murder (that's what helping identify dissidents in China is) whilst avoiding anti-monopoly action. I wonder if you can guess what it is [opensecrets.org]?
Re:Microsoft getting away with murder again. (Score:4, Insightful)
My guess is because antitrust law doesn't say anything about murder. They aren't related. Interestingly, murder law also says nothing about antitrust. Weird.
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Sometimes two things correlate without any causative link. Sometimes they are both caused by a third factor which explains why two, unrelated, strange phenomena happen simultaneously to the same body. Maybe you can work out which of these I tried to imply?
Re: Microsoft getting away with murder again. (Score:1)
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> and literal murder (that's what helping identify dissidents in China is)
No, it is not.
LinkedIn (Score:2)
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Facebook had charm?
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Facebook had charm?
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
a special sort of charm [esquire.com]; like a cad.
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Undetected sarcasm?
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Why is it news they don't say why? (Score:2)
...It's not like dictators usually show a notice such as, "We removed your access to this because we are paranoid dickheads who are afraid you'll learn the truth about our dickheadedness."
Re:Why is it news they don't say why? (Score:4, Insightful)
China has figured out a lot of things about how to run an authoritarian regime effectively. One is not to tell people why you do the things that you do. That forces people to *guess*. When people don't know where the line is, they end up policing themselves.
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It's like having an alcoholic step father: you don't know which days he comes home drunk and angry, so you assume he always will.
Title in English (Score:1)
The explanation. (Score:5, Funny)
"What countries have you worked in?"
Scholar: "I've worked in America, France, Taiwan, Britain, and Ger-"
China in a soiled diaper smashing a comically-oversized rattle against a wall: "WAAAAH! WAAAAH!!! TAIWAN NOT COUNTRY WAAAAH!!"
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It wouldn't take them that long to spot that Taiwan isn't a country - I'd guess it would happen as soon as the comma key is struct - and the 'scholar' should have known better.
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What is Taiwan, legally? A runaway SAR taking a watchful waiting approach to see how the PRC treats Hong Kong and Macau, China's other SARs?
When is the world (Score:3)
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You'd be surprised by the number of chinese nationals that actually support the CCP. Remember: there are almost two freaking billion chinese. If and when some of these people actually "rise up", it's not going to be a simple popular uprising and overthrow of a totalitarian regime, it's going to be the worst, most horrible, bloodiest civil war in the history of the entire human race. Country-wide carnage; hundreds of millions of refugies sweeping over eastern Asia, the entire world economy crashed and burned
Re: When is the world (Score:3)
It's more than too big to fail. It works because there is relative unity behind the governance. There are words in Chinese that cannot be easily translated to English because we have no concept of such loyalty. I live in China and when you begin to understand their perspective their government is no worse than any western power. it's just a different approach.
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Exactly that. Thank you.
I'd go so far as to say it is actual better than a lot of governments, in a lot of ways.
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There is no such thing as an untranslatable word, only words which cannot be translated into a single word in a given language. This whole narrative of Chinese superiority that you constantly push is utterly unsupported, and frankly ridiculous. Of COURSE you can support a system of rule for long periods if you base it on enough oppression.
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There are concept that the translation is so poor, the meaning is lost in translation. Some words that are hard to translate into Chinese are interfaith, pansexual, and to a lesser degree sapiosexual.
The word I was referring to can be roughly spelled as "gwei". This particular word is hard to translate because it refers to a relationship between parent and child which is rare in America. It refers to a child that is obedient and loyal to their parents. Most western children love their family but have a very
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There are 1.4 billion Chinese, but yes a lot of them are happy with the CCP. Reason being that they have seen their lives improve dramatically over the last few decades. Massive year-on-year economic growth, new opportunities and a rapidly rising standard of living. Their parents might have been farmers, now they are living in a modern apartment with a big TV, smartphone, car and a nice office or factory job. When they get sick there is a nice modern hospital to visit, not the local traditional medicine guy
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"The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus is has ever been."
Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong.
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And they support it because of the continual gaslighting. They are literally being driven insane by being forced to believe (or at least always act as if they believe) absurd propaganda. When you reject the evidence of your own senses in favor of a stupid story, you're not firing on all cylinders. And they're deliberately trained to behave this way, it's nothing unique to Chinese people. These techniques will work on anyone if applied for their entire lifetime.
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The CCP only wants to censor the world from the point of view of inside China. ...and why the hell not?
You're dreaming if you think that the CPC doesn't have massive support from the rest of the population of the PRC.
Understandable (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't find it moral, ethical, or anything of that sort, but I do at least understand that they have to follow the laws of different countries they operate in. The EU wouldn't give them a pass on GDPR compliance just because they're an American company any more than we give Volkswagen a pass because they're a German company.
It'd be great if they would chose not to operate in China as a kind of protest, but we all know that won't happen, and wouldn't that just be more of the infamous American arrogance, expecting everyone else in the world to think and act the same way we do?
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...but I do at least understand that they have to follow the laws of different countries they operate in....
U.S. companies need to decide if they want to be U.S. companies or Chinese companies, and act accordingly. If they can't do business in China while upholding U.S. law, they need to stop doing business in China or close up shop in the U.S.
It's disgusting that we allow U.S. companies to assist totalitarian governments. Tricky Dick started this mess, and every President and Congress since then has been complicit in the systematic dismantling of freedom around the world.
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> It is a country where wrong think can get you thrown into prison
This is false. You can think what you like.
You only get into trouble when you try to over throw the government. I think that's quite common anywhere in the world.
Re: Understandable (Score:1)
They regularly jail people for advocating a peaceful transition to democracy. How is that trying to overthrow the government?
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Oh, _0x0nyadesu, you're so cute with naive unsubstantiated views...
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Personally, I agree. However, American shareholders would never allow a company like Microsoft to leave all the money China represents on the table. And, as I asked in my earlier comment, wouldn't this just be more American imperialism? Expecting everyone else in the world to think and act like we do. Different cultures have different ideas about things and who is to say say South African culture is right and Middle-Eastern culture is wrong? It's important to be able to step outside of your own belief syste
Feature, Not a Bug (Score:2)
No such thing as too small (Score:2)
I am just a graduate student. I didn't think I would have mattered
Is he serious? I mean, this is how police states work. No one is below their notice when it comes to cracking down on criticizing the regime. That's kinda the base model on how it works in the first place.
Add Tiananmen Square Massacre to profile! (Score:2)
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Thanks, I put that on my LI page too (minus the footnote numbers, and with attribution to the Wikipedia). I'm curious to see what happens next.
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Undoubtedly just incompetence...there's a phrase about that, isn't there Johnny.
Abuse of Unicode (5:erocS) (Score:2)
As I've explained before [slashdot.org], Slashdot censors most code points outside ASCII because vandals have abused many code points outside ASCII to alter the layout of comments or to post sexually explicit or racially inflammatory glyph art.
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Slashdot doesn't support Unicode, at least not as Unicode characters. I think I've seen some non-ASCII characters rendered in slashdot, but they're actually numerical character references like "& # x 2 0 1 3 ;" (or substitute your favorite hexadecimal code point, but remove the space characters--I had to use those to prevent my browser--and probably yours--from rendering that as a Unicode character). There's probably a website somewhere that will convert actual non-ASCII characters into such reference
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In case you're wondering what really happened, from first hand reports, mostly by western journalist or diplomats, have a read here:
https://worldaffairs.blog/2019... [worldaffairs.blog]
Interestingly, this slashdot article will also get (Score:2)
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Well, I'm reading it from within China and so far so good.
I think they're becoming more thick skinned and basically couldn't care less what people outside China think.
Sounds Republican. (Score:2)
Wait, are they saying... (Score:1)
Here is the email I got from LinkedIn.. (Score:1)