7 ms·

LinkedIn and Censorship in China

74 points by tomkwok 11y ago

honest_joe 11y ago
Seriously China is a fucked up country when it comes to software,services and IT.
- VeejayRampay 11y ago
  Your handle shows promises of honesty, but where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner of an pejorative qualifier such as "fucked up"? Come on.
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    > where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner Yeah, well, the "country" has an all-encompassing government, which is pretty consistent in applying a uniform set of policies (at least when the policies benefit the government, anyway). In the context of an article about censorship and cooperating with authoritarian governments, it makes perfect sense.
    - VeejayRampay 11y ago
      Fair enough, I would tend to agree. Just wanted to point out that many Chinese citizens are victims of the system you're describing and it would be unfair to them to use too broad a stroke when talking about a "country" (as opposed to "The Chinese government" or even "some factions of the Chinese government").
      - honest_joe 11y ago
        Which is obvious ? Do not paint them as victims because not all of them are. They have the money to buy iPhones but not your average 0.99$ app ?
FilterSweep 11y ago
Interesting opinion, but The stipulations to becoming an entity in China are not much different than in the U.S. and other countries. Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer. I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt as the game is zero-sum.
- hvs 11y ago
  The difference is that one has guns.
- toyg 11y ago
  > Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer They are not even remotely the same thing. You can choose to ignore "social media outrage" and stay out of jail; try ignoring government demands in China and see how it works out. Cultural pressure to conform may be strong, but as long as it's informal, it's relatively easy to survive. When it becomes formal, you have to deal with a lot of people legally allowed to physically hurt you. There is censorship in the West (especially in the UK, where the police started jailing Twitter trolls and Facebook bullies, as well as censoring DNS calls), but it's nowhere near the scale of what you see in China... yet. > I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt Maybe LI is a bit morally-bankrupter than the average?
  - FilterSweep 11y ago
    Ahhhh, fusking a post really makes it much easier to take the high ground doesn't it? You've admitted it yourself - not only has the UK has started jailing "Internet bullies" but Canada has recently begun taking this to an even further extreme by jailing a man for 6 months who simply disagreed with a feminist shaming campaign planned out on a [different] young man: http://www.infowars.com/man-faces-6-months-in-jail-for-disagreeing-with-feminists-on-twitter/ http://www.infowars.com/man-faces-6-months-in-jail-for-disag... I don't see the US not following this pattern in the near future as well. Try telling someone who has been the victim of a Twitter doxxing, or had their personal information shared online, that they can "just ignore it" when harassment from justice bots spills over into their real life. Simply deactivating your accounts on these platforms doesn't render immunity. If you don't see direction in which the discussions you share on the Internet is going, one should simply follow the Google Ad / Zuckerberg anti-pseudonym zeitgeist going on in a global scale today. Now, I'll agree with you that the difference in "scale" of repercussion is in magnitudes, but here's the kicker: If one were a dissadent in China, please tell me WHY you would choose LinkedIn as your platform to share your dissenting opinion on. Why would you seek out the service in the first place? These dissenting citizens are not waiting on bated breath for foreign companies to provide them a platform to voice their opinion. You assume way too much in that Chinese citizens NEED LinkedIn to share their dissenting opinions. Chinese-borne services such as Weibo follow the same censorship guidelines as well.
phowat 11y ago
Everyone hates LinkedIn, yet most people keep using it (myself included). Where's the kickass LinkedIn competitor so we can all move on to ?
- mhidalgo 11y ago
  Just curious what are the things you hate about linkedin specifically.
  - fecak 11y ago
    The biggest complaint I hear about LinkedIn is the amount of email the company sends users (not mail generated by other users, but mail generated by LinkedIn itself). It also seems to rather consistently ask to access your email contacts ("who do you know on LinkedIn?").
    - throwaway7767 11y ago
      They also maintain shadow profiles of people who don't use linkedin by scraping their users address books. It's a really scummy company.
    - nothrabannosir 11y ago
      A really good way to deal with this is just mark all those mails as SPAM. Let them eat the negative SPAM feedback until all their mails end up in the trash.
  - dmeb 11y ago
    I really dislike their aggressive attempts to get new members to send out join requests to every person they've ever corresponded with on gmail. I've gotten many invitations from people whom I'm pretty sure had no idea that LinkedIn was going to scrape their contacts and spam everyone. This happens a couple times a year ever since like 2010? I haven't seen any other tech company do something similar. There is a lot of value in their network, but this is pretty obnoxious and basically dominates my impression of the tradeoffs they're willing to make
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vaginaman23 11y ago
It's funny how quickly anti-China comments in this thread are being downvoted. Hey underpaid China censors+bots, are you there?
- evook 11y ago
  Try to say something about China that wasn't, isn't or won't be true for every other country. General Society and it's concept underlies circulation. It's just not well documented in some parts, but we're on relativising this fact and maybe in 100 Years there will be a generation willing to learn and shift this concept. Not change.
- gjm11 11y ago
  Right now, the only one I see that's been visibly downvoted is yours right here. Which I am about to downvote myself, because I have a general policy of downvoting complaints about downvoting (because they are boring) unless there's something more to them than "waaaaah, I'm (or my political/religious/social allies are) being downvoted and I don't like it".
crudbug 11y ago
Technology recycle - Slow Death !
kylnew 11y ago
I deleted my LinkedIn account months ago and it has had no negative impact whatsoever. Just less emails telling me my mom has endorsed me for Javascript.
- mbrutsch 11y ago
  Same here, never gained anything by having an account, haven't lost anything after closing it.
- Balgair 11y ago
  I mean really, what do they do for me exactly? I have never heard of a friend that got a job through them or found any real value. Besides having a digital rolodex function, one that my email client does anyway, how do they help me? It just seems like a liability, one more thing that can mess up in my life or that I can inadvertently mess up.
  - Nelkins 11y ago
    Counter anecdote: I got my current job through LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out the first time, and I said I wasn't interested. A few weeks later I decided to test the waters and I put my resume on Dice.com. The same recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few hours later, saying he saw my resume on Dice and asked if anything had changed. It had, I interviewed, and I've been working here for a little over a year and a half. For me it's a convenient way of having recruiters reach out without having my normal inbox completely spammed.
  - carlmcqueen 11y ago
    Not much additionally to add from the previous comment except that I thought a lot of the recruitment stuff I got from LinkedIn was fake until a friend got a pretty amazing job through a LinkedIn found recruiter. I have replied to a few recruiters and while I haven't changed companies, it is the equivelent of head hunters for our generation and some of them have been very, very tempting offers.
  - woud420 11y ago
    LinkedIn is a great way for recruiters to reach you and offer you job opportunities from companies you've never heard of but might be super interesting to you. Easily 80%+ of the interview offers I've received in the last 5 years have been through LinkedIn (from small startups to tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix or other big companies such as Morgan Stanley). It's also a pretty good platform to look for jobs out of your local network, say, if you're a foreigner looking to tap in that sweet sweet US tech job market.
joosters 11y ago
"In its heyday, Weibo employed 4000 censors in house" I thought Weibo was still big in China, yet this implies that the service is on the wane?
- prewett 11y ago
  I think WeChat started being more popular a year or two ago, due to less censorship (at the time). However, this is all based on vague impressions from reading sinocism.com and not by any hard data whatsoever.
dasil003 11y ago
Not that I don't think the Chinese government does evil things, and not that I think LinkedIn has any moral high ground on anything whatsoever, but is it an American company's job to solve Chinese political oppression? I'm more concerned about the NSA and whatever shenanigans American corporations are capitulating to back home. That is something where I have the context, cultural awareness, and moral duty to try to effect change. But when it comes to the Chinese government, I don't see how western individuals or companies have any capacity to impose their moral compass. If you don't comply with local laws then you don't operate in that country. China will simply build their own LinkedIn and the world will be less connected. I don't see how that adds a modicum of pressure for the Chinese government to reform, change has to be demanded from within China.
discardorama 11y ago
Two wrongs don't make a right, but since the author is in the US, I'd like to ask him: do you know why it took Al Jazeera so long to get into the US? Do you know what Al Jazeera had to create a separate entity, "Al Jazeera America" ?
dang 11y ago
This is a substantive post, but the title is too baity for HN, so we've changed it to something neutral. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a better one.
wyclif 11y ago
"Technological and financial giants, but moral pygmies" (as HN edited the title) is better than the original which has an error. Heads up. EDIT: Now HN has edited the title again to something completely unlike the original title.

74 points by tomkwok 11y ago

honest_joe 11y ago

Seriously China is a fucked up country when it comes to software,services and IT.

VeejayRampay 11y ago
Your handle shows promises of honesty, but where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner of an pejorative qualifier such as "fucked up"? Come on.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > where is it when you end up bundling a "country" of some one billion and a half people under the all-encompassing banner Yeah, well, the "country" has an all-encompassing government, which is pretty consistent in applying a uniform set of policies (at least when the policies benefit the government, anyway). In the context of an article about censorship and cooperating with authoritarian governments, it makes perfect sense.
  - VeejayRampay 11y ago
    Fair enough, I would tend to agree. Just wanted to point out that many Chinese citizens are victims of the system you're describing and it would be unfair to them to use too broad a stroke when talking about a "country" (as opposed to "The Chinese government" or even "some factions of the Chinese government").
    - honest_joe 11y ago
      Which is obvious ? Do not paint them as victims because not all of them are. They have the money to buy iPhones but not your average 0.99$ app ?

FilterSweep 11y ago

Interesting opinion, but The stipulations to becoming an entity in China are not much different than in the U.S. and other countries. Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer. I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt as the game is zero-sum.

hvs 11y ago
The difference is that one has guns.
toyg 11y ago
> Replace their government censorship with our social media outrage, and the parallels become clearer They are not even remotely the same thing. You can choose to ignore "social media outrage" and stay out of jail; try ignoring government demands in China and see how it works out. Cultural pressure to conform may be strong, but as long as it's informal, it's relatively easy to survive. When it becomes formal, you have to deal with a lot of people legally allowed to physically hurt you. There is censorship in the West (especially in the UK, where the police started jailing Twitter trolls and Facebook bullies, as well as censoring DNS calls), but it's nowhere near the scale of what you see in China... yet. > I don't see how this makes LinkedIn morally bankrupt - or more accurately, the whole industry is morally bankrupt Maybe LI is a bit morally-bankrupter than the average?
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  Ahhhh, fusking a post really makes it much easier to take the high ground doesn't it? You've admitted it yourself - not only has the UK has started jailing "Internet bullies" but Canada has recently begun taking this to an even further extreme by jailing a man for 6 months who simply disagreed with a feminist shaming campaign planned out on a [different] young man: http://www.infowars.com/man-faces-6-months-in-jail-for-disagreeing-with-feminists-on-twitter/ http://www.infowars.com/man-faces-6-months-in-jail-for-disag... I don't see the US not following this pattern in the near future as well. Try telling someone who has been the victim of a Twitter doxxing, or had their personal information shared online, that they can "just ignore it" when harassment from justice bots spills over into their real life. Simply deactivating your accounts on these platforms doesn't render immunity. If you don't see direction in which the discussions you share on the Internet is going, one should simply follow the Google Ad / Zuckerberg anti-pseudonym zeitgeist going on in a global scale today. Now, I'll agree with you that the difference in "scale" of repercussion is in magnitudes, but here's the kicker: If one were a dissadent in China, please tell me WHY you would choose LinkedIn as your platform to share your dissenting opinion on. Why would you seek out the service in the first place? These dissenting citizens are not waiting on bated breath for foreign companies to provide them a platform to voice their opinion. You assume way too much in that Chinese citizens NEED LinkedIn to share their dissenting opinions. Chinese-borne services such as Weibo follow the same censorship guidelines as well.

phowat 11y ago

Everyone hates LinkedIn, yet most people keep using it (myself included). Where's the kickass LinkedIn competitor so we can all move on to ?

mhidalgo 11y ago
Just curious what are the things you hate about linkedin specifically.
- fecak 11y ago
  The biggest complaint I hear about LinkedIn is the amount of email the company sends users (not mail generated by other users, but mail generated by LinkedIn itself). It also seems to rather consistently ask to access your email contacts ("who do you know on LinkedIn?").
  - throwaway7767 11y ago
    They also maintain shadow profiles of people who don't use linkedin by scraping their users address books. It's a really scummy company.
  - nothrabannosir 11y ago
    A really good way to deal with this is just mark all those mails as SPAM. Let them eat the negative SPAM feedback until all their mails end up in the trash.
- dmeb 11y ago
  I really dislike their aggressive attempts to get new members to send out join requests to every person they've ever corresponded with on gmail. I've gotten many invitations from people whom I'm pretty sure had no idea that LinkedIn was going to scrape their contacts and spam everyone. This happens a couple times a year ever since like 2010? I haven't seen any other tech company do something similar. There is a lot of value in their network, but this is pretty obnoxious and basically dominates my impression of the tradeoffs they're willing to make

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

vaginaman23 11y ago

It's funny how quickly anti-China comments in this thread are being downvoted. Hey underpaid China censors+bots, are you there?

evook 11y ago
Try to say something about China that wasn't, isn't or won't be true for every other country. General Society and it's concept underlies circulation. It's just not well documented in some parts, but we're on relativising this fact and maybe in 100 Years there will be a generation willing to learn and shift this concept. Not change.
gjm11 11y ago
Right now, the only one I see that's been visibly downvoted is yours right here. Which I am about to downvote myself, because I have a general policy of downvoting complaints about downvoting (because they are boring) unless there's something more to them than "waaaaah, I'm (or my political/religious/social allies are) being downvoted and I don't like it".

crudbug 11y ago

Technology recycle - Slow Death !

kylnew 11y ago

I deleted my LinkedIn account months ago and it has had no negative impact whatsoever. Just less emails telling me my mom has endorsed me for Javascript.

mbrutsch 11y ago
Same here, never gained anything by having an account, haven't lost anything after closing it.
Balgair 11y ago
I mean really, what do they do for me exactly? I have never heard of a friend that got a job through them or found any real value. Besides having a digital rolodex function, one that my email client does anyway, how do they help me? It just seems like a liability, one more thing that can mess up in my life or that I can inadvertently mess up.
- Nelkins 11y ago
  Counter anecdote: I got my current job through LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out the first time, and I said I wasn't interested. A few weeks later I decided to test the waters and I put my resume on Dice.com. The same recruiter reached out on LinkedIn a few hours later, saying he saw my resume on Dice and asked if anything had changed. It had, I interviewed, and I've been working here for a little over a year and a half. For me it's a convenient way of having recruiters reach out without having my normal inbox completely spammed.
- carlmcqueen 11y ago
  Not much additionally to add from the previous comment except that I thought a lot of the recruitment stuff I got from LinkedIn was fake until a friend got a pretty amazing job through a LinkedIn found recruiter. I have replied to a few recruiters and while I haven't changed companies, it is the equivelent of head hunters for our generation and some of them have been very, very tempting offers.
- woud420 11y ago
  LinkedIn is a great way for recruiters to reach you and offer you job opportunities from companies you've never heard of but might be super interesting to you. Easily 80%+ of the interview offers I've received in the last 5 years have been through LinkedIn (from small startups to tech giants such as Amazon, Netflix or other big companies such as Morgan Stanley). It's also a pretty good platform to look for jobs out of your local network, say, if you're a foreigner looking to tap in that sweet sweet US tech job market.

joosters 11y ago

"In its heyday, Weibo employed 4000 censors in house" I thought Weibo was still big in China, yet this implies that the service is on the wane?

prewett 11y ago
I think WeChat started being more popular a year or two ago, due to less censorship (at the time). However, this is all based on vague impressions from reading sinocism.com and not by any hard data whatsoever.

dasil003 11y ago

Not that I don't think the Chinese government does evil things, and not that I think LinkedIn has any moral high ground on anything whatsoever, but is it an American company's job to solve Chinese political oppression? I'm more concerned about the NSA and whatever shenanigans American corporations are capitulating to back home. That is something where I have the context, cultural awareness, and moral duty to try to effect change. But when it comes to the Chinese government, I don't see how western individuals or companies have any capacity to impose their moral compass. If you don't comply with local laws then you don't operate in that country. China will simply build their own LinkedIn and the world will be less connected. I don't see how that adds a modicum of pressure for the Chinese government to reform, change has to be demanded from within China.

discardorama 11y ago

Two wrongs don't make a right, but since the author is in the US, I'd like to ask him: do you know why it took Al Jazeera so long to get into the US? Do you know what Al Jazeera had to create a separate entity, "Al Jazeera America" ?

dang 11y ago

This is a substantive post, but the title is too baity for HN, so we've changed it to something neutral. Happy to change it again if anyone suggests a better one.

wyclif 11y ago

"Technological and financial giants, but moral pygmies" (as HN edited the title) is better than the original which has an error. Heads up. EDIT: Now HN has edited the title again to something completely unlike the original title.