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Microsoft said it will shut down its LinkedIn site inside of China, days after facing public criticism for censoring the posts of several U.S. journalists.

In announcing the decision Thursday, LinkedIn said it was facing “a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

The news brings to an end the last major Western social-media site operating inside China, where the authorities have long blocked Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and other apps.

“Increased repression inside China, and greater criticism from Congress of going along with Chinese regulations, have made it unsustainable” for U.S. social-media companies, said Adam Segal, an expert on China and technology at the Council on Foreign Relations.

LinkedIn said it will “sunset” its current site later this year, but will launch a new site called InJobs that will not include a social-media feed or the ability to share posts or articles.

“Our new strategy for China is to put our focus on helping China-based professionals find jobs in China and Chinese companies find quality candidates,” LinkedIn said. It didn’t provide further details.

Chinese-owned social-media apps, such as WeChat and Weibo, are heavily censored to delete content that the authorities deem sensitive. And U.S. users of LinkedIn in recent weeks said they have faced similar censorship on their profiles inside China.

Those reports prompted Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., to write a letter to the chief executives of Microsoft and LinkedIn expressing concern that an “American company is actively censoring American journalists on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.”

One of the journalists, Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, an Axios reporter who focuses on China from Washington, D.C., reported on Sept. 30 that LinkedIn had blocked her own profile and those of other U.S. journalists in China.

In an interview Thursday, Allen-Ebrahimian said LinkedIn several weeks ago sent her a message informing her that her profile would no longer be viewable in China because it contained “prohibited” content.

Allen-Ebrahimian asked the company several times for more specifics but “they never told me what the prohibited content was,” she said. LinkedIn didn’t respond to questions about that on Thursday.

Even if LinkedIn’s new site lacks social-media features, the company will still be subjected to potentially invasive information requests from the Chinese authorities, Allen-Ebrahimian said.

“If the Chinese authorities want to know, has this person messaged with anybody, have they applied for any jobs? InJobs will have to provide that. If it’s a criminal matter, okay, but what if they’re doing it for political reasons?” she asked.

Melissa Chan, an American journalist who has reported for Vice and The Atlantic, also disclosed that LinkedIn had blocked her profile in China over “prohibited” content.

“There remains a lot more questions than answers,” Chan said by email on Thursday. “Did some Chinese authority reach out to LinkedIn with a list of people and posts they had a problem with? Or did LinkedIn take the initiative and do it themselves? Knowing what happened matters.”

Greg Bruno, a freelance journalist and author who focuses on Tibetan issues, said in an interview Thursday that LinkedIn told him he was blocked inside China due to “prohibited” content in the publications section of his profile. The only information in this section was about his three-year-old book, which he said details “China’s effort to marginalize and de-ligitimize Tibetan exiles.”

“I was pretty angry,” he said. “The biggest thing that bothered me about LinkedIn’s message was it was putting the onus on me to self-censor.”

Despite his troubles with LinkedIn, Bruno lamented the end of the last U.S. social-media holdout in China. “This is just going to continue to insulate us in our information bubbles and cut us off as people,” he said.

Published : October 15, 2021

By : The Washington Post

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Three months after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, Virgin Galactic, his space tourism company, is postponing its next test flight to make what it calls enhancements to its space plane that would make it safer over the long-term, the company announced Thursday.

The decision means that a test flight scheduled for this month, which was to have flown members of the Italian Air Force and National Research Council, will be delayed until the second half of next year, and commercial service wouldn’t begin until the fourth quarter of that year, the company said.

The stand down is yet another sign of the complexities of human space flight and comes as a number of companies have been working on flying paying customers to either the edge of space or to orbit. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly delayed flying its paying customers, some of whom have waited years. After suspending ticket sales, which had been priced at $250,000 each, the company announced this year it was reopening tickets sales at $450,000 each.

In a statement, Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said the company’s spacecraft “are designed with significant margins for safety, providing layers of protection that far exceed loads experienced and expected to occur on our flights.” The enhancement to the spacecraft “underscores our safety-first procedures, provides the most efficient path to commercial service and is the right approach for our business and our customers.”

Earlier this year, Branson, who had been itching to get to space for years, moved up his flight and was able to beat rival Jeff Bezos to space by less than two weeks. But Bezos’ Blue Origin just completed its second successful human spaceflight on Wednesday, carrying William Shatner and three others on a quick suborbital flight to an altitude of more than 66 miles.

It is planning one more flight by the end of the year and a half dozen or more next year.

A Virgin Galactic spokesperson said that there were no issues with the vehicle currently and that it would be cleared to fly in the next month or two. But as the company tested materials in the laboratory to determine how often parts and materials would need to be inspected and maintained, the data projected lower safety margins over the long-term.

The company had been planning to stand down for some time at the end of the year to perform maintenance on its mother ship, which hoists the spaceplane aloft so that it can be “air launched” from about 45,000 feet. It will now perform that work immediately and include the additional spacecraft materials in the review as well.

While the delay for the Italian Air Force mission is several months, the delay of commercial service from when it was originally foreseen should be only about a month or so, the person said.

The Italian Air Force flight had been delayed previously after the company noticed a potential defect in a component supplied by an outside contractor. The current delay is unrelated to that, the company said. The earlier issue has been resolved.

Virgin Galactic was also grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration this year after Branson’s flight went off course during its descent and controllers failed to inform the FAA it was flying outside of its restricted airspace. The FAA announced last month it was allowing the company to return to flight operations after the company made changes on how it would communicate with the FAA during flights.

Published : October 15, 2021

By : The Washington Post