LinkedIn is the latest western tech company to pull out of China, as it today announced exiting the market citing challenging environment and greater compliance requirements.
LinkedIn also revealed to launch a new job portal named InJobs, dedicated to Chinese professionals that come with no social feed. LinkedIn was earlier warned of unregulated content on its platform, by Chinese authorities.
LinkedIn Exits China
China is well-known to be restricting content that’s flowing within the country. So much so that, it built a nationwide firewall to prevent local data from leaking, and letting its citizens have freedom like other nations.
Some rules forced global companies to exit, like Facebook and Twitter left China in 2009, whereas Google exited in 2010. Now, the time has come for LinkedIn – the popular job searching platform from Microsoft.
LinkedIn entered China in 2014 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2016. Since then, it grew to be one of the most popular social media and networking platforms in the world. In China, it remained the only unregulated social media from America to date.
But now, it’s shutting down too! As per its announcement, LinkedIn announced exiting from China citing “significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”
This is expected, as the platform was already warned by the Chinese regulator in March, to comply with their local rules in regulating the content as asked. LinkedIn has also informed several human rights activists and journalists earlier and locked their profiles for posting prohibited content.
While it’s formally exiting now, LinkedIn announced to come up with a new platform called InJobs – dedicated to local profesionals. Well, this is informed to becoming without the social feed, where users can share and post content like in regular LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s departure makes it the latest tech company to exit China after Signal and clubhouse were banned earlier this year.
