LinkedIn faces awkward choices in China

FOREIGN INTERNET firms have a rough time in China. To stop the spread of ideas it deems dangerous, the Communist Party blocked YouTube’s video-sharing site, Facebook’s social network and Twitter’s microblog in 2009. A year later Google abruptly shut its Chinese search engine after a dispute with censors. Chinese who want to access Western social media must do so via virtual private networks, which is finicky and can be illegal.

One exception to this heavy-handed rule is LinkedIn. China’s government tolerates the professional network, perhaps because most people use it to hunt for jobs and business contacts, not talk about democracy. The number of LinkedIn’s Chinese users has grown rapidly since Microsoft purchased it in 2016, to 53m. They make up around 7% of LinkedIn’s global total, up from 1.4% in 2014. Microsoft does not disclose how much China contributes to LinkedIn’s revenues, which reached $8bn in 2020. Still, the software giant can tout it as a rare Western social-networking win in a market of nearly 1bn netizens.

But operating in a dictatorship presents awkward choices for a platform designed for the exchange of ideas, as well as business cards. To comply with China’s laws, LinkedIn must limit what users can post. Since March, when China’s cyberspace regulator criticised its lax controls, it seems to have...