The company is still encouraging individuals to work remotely until conditions improve, though, according to a blog post from Microsoft Executive Vice President Kurt DelBene.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
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A website that tracks Apple's App Store globally has reported a recent slate of takedowns of Quran and Bible-related apps in China.
Apple Censorship, a site that tracks changes to what's available in the U.S.-based tech giant's App Stores, reports a number of recent deletions in mainland China. According to that site, those include the following:
- Oct. 8: The widely used Quran Majeed was removed.
- Oct. 8: Muslim Pro, another popular app that tracks Muslim prayer times, was removed.
- Oct. 8: Bible App by Olive Tree, a popular Bible study guide, was removed.
While Christianity and Islam are both legally permitted in China, their practice is closely regulated. And under Xi Jinping, Beijing has taken increasingly harsh stances making the practice of both more difficult. Islam has faced a particularly hostile environment, with Muslim Uyghurs in the western region of Xinjiang reportedly subject to near-constant surveillance and frequent human rights violations. Apple's China operations are subject to Chinese law, and per a May 17, 2021 report in The New York Times, the company also "proactively censors its Chinese App Store."
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Facebook has made a series of increasingly aggressive statements in recent weeks, attempting to undermine The Wall Street Journal's reporting on thousands of pages of leaked internal documents. On Monday, the company tried a new approach, chastising reporters for such indiscretions as … collaborating and agreeing to press embargoes.
"Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents," Facebook's vice president of communications, John Pinette, wrote in a tweet Monday. "We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs."
Pinette accused these the journalists working on this project of engaging in a "gotcha" campaign.
Reporters and former Facebook employees alike were quick to point out the fact that agreeing to conditions around how and when information can be quoted and referenced is something Facebook asks reporters to do on a near daily basis.
A play, in two parts. https://t.co/gdm27dzBur— She-Ra Frenkel (@She-Ra Frenkel) 1634580628.0
Others just appreciated the notice:
Nice. Excited to read. Thanks for the heads-up https://t.co/jvy4p36XTb— Drew Harwell (@Drew Harwell) 1634580322.0
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The Netflix trans employee resource group released a list of demands to the company ahead of a planned Wednesday walkout over the controversial Dave Chappelle special "The Closer," asking for increased investment in trans-affirming content and recruitment of trans leaders, adding disclaimers and labels for transphobic content and other changes.
Leaders of the Trans* ERG are planning a walkout Wednesday to protest the company's streaming of "The Closer" and the firing of one of the walkout's organizers, who was dismissed after the company suspected they leaked streaming data about the comedy special.
The demands, first reported by The Verge, do not ask for the removal of the Chappelle special. They do insist that Netflix "acknowledge the harm and Netflix's responsibility for this harm from transphobic content, and in particular harm to the Black trans community," which appears directly aimed at co-CEO Ted Sarandos' statement last week that the company does not believe "The Closer" directly causes real-world harm or violence.
"We are employees, but we are members, too. We believe that this Company can and must do better in our quest to entertain the world, and that the way forward must include more diverse voices in order to avoid causing more harm," the walkout organizers wrote in their statement.
NOTE: Protocol has agreed to be acquired by Axel Springer, whose Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Mathias Döpfner, is on the board of Netflix.
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Informatica is aiming to raise as much as $928 million in its pending public offering, according to a federal filing on Monday.
The data integration vendor will sell 29 million shares for as high as $32 each. That could value the company as high as $8.8 billion.
The IPO comes as vendors that help companies manage their corporate information report huge funding rounds and double-digit growth year-over-year.
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New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating crypto lending platforms, calling them "high-risk virtual currency schemes."
James has ordered two unnamed companies to cease and desist operations for residents of New York. She has ordered three other companies to provide information to her office.
While the two companies ordered to cease operations were not named, unredacted file names of the letters name the two companies as Nexo and Celsius. Nexo said in a tweet that it does not offer its Earn product to New Yorkers.
These products are essentially unregistered interest-bearing accounts, James alleged. "Virtual or 'crypto' currency lending platforms are essentially interest-bearing accounts that offer investors a rate of return on virtual currencies that are deposited with them."
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N26 has raised more than $900 million in a series E round that values the German challenger bank at more than $9 billion, the company said Monday.
The funding round was led by Third Point Ventures and Coatue Management. N26 said it now has more than 7 million customers in 25 countries. The company said it expects to record more than $90 billion in transaction volume in 2021.
The investment underscores the growth of the digital banking industry, where N26 competes with startups like Chime and Current.
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Facebook wants to be the company that moves our lives into the shared virtual reality known as the metaverse — and apparently, the company needs to hire 10,000 engineers in the European Union to make that happen.
The company announced Monday that it's going on a massive European hiring spree over the next five years because "Europe is very important to Facebook," and "European policymakers are leading the way in helping to embed European values like free expression, privacy, transparency and the rights of individuals into the day-to-day workings of the internet," according to Monday's announcement. The statement also asks European governments to work with Facebook to find the talent it needs.
Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing the idea that Facebook will be the leader in creating the metaverse over the last year, and Facebook recently appointed Andrew Bosworth, its longtime AR/VR leader and expert, as Facebook's new incoming chief technology officer.
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Amazon would like to hire 150,000 seasonal workers across more than 20 states, in addition to more than 100,000 non-seasonal workers in warehousing and delivery — all while the country faces a notoriously stubborn labor shortage that's leaving even popular employers with a hard time filling jobs.
And Amazon has found itself less than popular with lots of workers, battling unusually high worker turnover rates that have made it difficult for the company to find interested workers in some places. The company said earlier this year it plans to hire more than 100,000 (non-seasonal) fulfillment workers and 40,000 additional corporate employees, hires that — if they happen — would make Amazon the largest private employer in the United States, surpassing Walmart.
The company has responded to its hiring issues and the labor shortage with pay boosts and other incentives — for example, it plans to offer an average $18 per hour starting salary, plus a $3,000 signing bonus, for the new seasonal workers across more than 20 states. Some workers may receive an additional $3 per hour depending on shifts — though what type of shift was unspecified — in many states, according to Amazon's Monday press release.
Amazon also recently unveiled a new "free" tuition coverage plan for workers who stay on more than three months, though the actual offerings of that plan are somewhat limited. Walmart, Target and other large employers have also started offering competing benefits.
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Top Amazon officials, including former CEO Jeff Bezos, appear to have misled Congress regarding the company's treatment of third-party sellers, according to a bipartisan group of lawmakers.
The leaders of the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust probe into Big Tech said, in a Monday letter to Andy Jassy, that recent reports contradict company officials' claims that Amazon doesn't preference its own offerings above those of third-party sellers on the site and doesn't use the private data of individual sellers to compete against them.
The letter comes after a Reuters report found last week that Amazon engaged in "a formal, clandestine strategy" in India of copying other sellers' goods with its own brands and then ensured its offerings appeared near the top of searches. An investigation in The Markup found similar behavior in the U.S.
"At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon's representatives misled the Committee," the five lawmakers wrote. "At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress in possible violation of federal criminal law."
The members of Congress urged Amazon to send "truthful" responses "as we consider whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate."
The letter cited several instances of testimony from Amazon lawyers and officials that the lawmakers said "directly contradicts" the recent reports, including the appearance last year from Bezos, who was then CEO.
Committee leaders had previously expressed worries about the truthfulness of Amazon's answer on the topic, suggesting ahead of securing Bezos' testimony that he needed to appear to put the matter to rest.
Amazon said Monday in a statement it "did not mislead the committee," stressing that its search function prioritizes what customers want and its policy "prohibits the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products."
"We investigate any allegations that this policy may have been violated and take appropriate action," the company said.
This article was updated to include an Amazon statement.
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Comcast is getting ready to launch its first smart TVs in the U.S. The company is set to launch two TV models manufactured by Hisense under the XClass TV brand as early as this week, Protocol has learned. Retail partner Walmart already listed one of the models Sunday night, revealing further details about the product.
Comcast didn't immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday; the company's plans to launch XClass-branded smart TVs were first reported by Protocol last month.
Walmart's website listed a 43-inch model Sunday evening. A 50-inch XClass TV model also manufactured by Hisense had yet to appear on the site. The description on Walmart's site underscored simplicity as a key value of the product. "XClass TV brings you all the joy of TV and none of the frustration," the listing reads in part. "XClassTV is lightning fast, effortless, and personalized for you — which means less waiting, less searching, and more joy."
XClass TVs will offer access to apps from Netflix YouTube, Hulu and Disney+, according to the product listing. "You're greeted by a home screen that puts the apps and services you love in one place," it reads in part. "Quickly pick up where you left off with your recently watched programs, plus get recommendations based on what you watch."
Walmart's site listed a retail price of $301.31 for the 43-inch TV, which may be a placeholder price. As previously reported by Protocol, Comcast is offering new XCLass TV buyers 12 months of free access to its Peacock Premium streaming service.
XClass isn't Comcast's only attempt to gain a foothold in the smart TV space. The company also launched a Sky Glass-branded smart TV in the U.K. earlier this month.
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Expensify, which makes cloud software that helps businesses manage their expenses, filed for an initial public offering on Friday.
Expensify, which was founded in 2008, said it plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker symbol "EXFY."
The Portland-based company reported a loss of $1.7 million, on revenue of $88 million in 2020, compared to a profit of $1.2 million on revenue of $80.5 million in 2019. Expensify reported sales of $65 million in the first six months of 2021, up from $40.6 million in the year-ago period.
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Netflix fired the person who organized the upcoming walkout over Dave Chappelle's new comedy special, "The Closer," on suspicion of disclosing metrics to the press, according to The Verge. The worker, who is Black, was not named for fear of online harassment.
The metrics in question include how much money Netflix made off Chappelle's special and how many people it reached; those metrics ended up in a Bloomberg report. The employee, who leads the company's trans employee resource group, had been laying out plans to protest Netflix's decision to release the comedy special, which Netflix has defended.
Netflix and other tech companies have recently been embroiled in controversy all stemming from their own employees. While Facebook is a more recent and notable example, having been caught up with two whistleblowers in recent weeks, Apple has also had its fair shares of run-ins with employees. The company just fired an #AppleToo leader, Janneke Parrish, for deleting content off her work devices, and terminated another employee who spoke out against the company last month.
The streaming service also suspended Terra Field, a trans software engineer whose tweet about the controversy went viral, but later reinstated her. "This is not me, but I am furious about it," Field tweeted on Friday in response to the employee's firing.
A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the termination, saying the company let go an employee for "sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company." "We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company," the spokesperson said.
This post was updated with comment from Netflix.
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This week Google began rolling out an infinite scroll feature "for most English searches on mobile in the U.S.," according to the company. Prior to the update, mobile users had to click a button to load a new page of results.
Google said in a press release announcing the decision: "While you can often find what you're looking for in the first few results, sometimes you want to keep looking. In fact, most people who want additional information tend to browse up to four pages of search results. With this update, people can now seamlessly do this, browsing through many different results, before needing to click the 'See more' button."
The company didn't provide an estimate for the full rollout of infinite scroll, or for when the feature might be offered outside the U.S.
Google users will likely be familiar with the infinite scroll experience from social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all implement infinite scroll within their social feeds.
Critics of infinite scroll say it manipulates users into spending more time online. The inventor of the feature, Aza Raskin, claims he feels guilty about having created it. "If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling," Raskin told the BBC.
Infinite scroll stands to benefit Google if users scroll through more search results and are therefore exposed to more ads. One interesting aspect of the design change is that it reorients the positioning of advertising within search results: Rather than coming at the top and bottom of each page, the ads are placed throughout the infinite stream of search results. This could benefit Google by making it more difficult for users to differentiate between paid and organic search results.
Alphabet generated $50.4 billion in advertising revenue for the three months ended June 30, 2021. That constituted nearly 82% of total revenue for the quarter.
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The director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency tweeted Friday in praise of people "working to find and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities."
The tweet by Jen Easterly came a day after Missouri's Republican governor accused a reporter of illegal hacking for a story on a flaw in a state website that exposed teachers' sensitive personal information.
According to reports, the journalist used tools that come standard on most browsers to identify the issue in the public-facing code of the site, and the reporter waited until the problem had been corrected to publish.
The accusations by Gov. Mike Parson led to suggestions that he was threatening the reporter for responsibly exposing public lapses.
Cybersecurity researchers, including those working for the world's top companies, routinely probe software for security oversights and vulnerabilities to repair them before bad actors can find them, and such actions are considered a crucial part of protecting digital infrastructure.
Several people suggested that Easterly's reminder that CISA "greatly value[s] the partnerships and efforts of researchers, hackers, academics" and others whose work "makes us all more safe & more secure" was aimed at Parson.
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Beijing is considering elevating the Antimonopoly Bureau to a vice-ministerial level agency amid a widening regulatory crackdown on Big Tech, Reuters reported Wednesday.
The antitrust watchdog currently sits within the State Administration for Market Regulation, which has frequently made headlines as it imposed record-breaking fines on tech giants this year. The new plan is to make the bureau a vice-ministerial level agency and rename it to the National Antimonopoly Bureau, sources with knowledge of the plans told Reuters.
This restructuring plan follows Chinese president Xi Jinping's mid-March push to enhance oversight of the so-called "platform economy" and "enrich the antimonopoly regulatory force."
This is "the biggest news in Chinese antitrust history," antitrust expert Angela Zhang, an associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, wrote on Twitter. "This new regulatory restructuring will be a significant boost to Chinese antitrust enforcement."
Legal experts have long been skeptical whether the current, thinly staffed Antimonopoly Bureau of the State Administration for Market Regulation would be able to tackle the mounting antitrust cases in the tech sector.
Once the central antitrust watchdog is granted higher authority, the agency could see its staff increase to at least 100 from 35, Zhang said. The reformed bureau will also oversee three separate agencies: one to oversee mergers and acquisitions, another to conduct investigations and a third to draft competition policies.
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A top Google executive on Friday criticized a major forthcoming antitrust bill in the Senate, warning that the American Innovation and Choice Online Act could have "unintended consequences" that break "a range of popular products that people use everyday."
"We're not opposed to antitrust scrutiny or updated regulations and we encourage Congress to take up the challenge of acting on areas of widespread agreement, like protecting Americans' privacy and updating protections for children," Google's vice president of government affairs Mark Isakowitz said in a statement posted to Twitter. "But just like the controversial package in the House, this bill doesn't address the real issues - rather, it would break a wide range of helpful services from leading American companies, while making those services less safe, less private and less secure."
The bipartisan Senate bill, which is set to be introduced next week by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin, would prohibit large tech companies from self-preferencing their own goods and services on platforms they own. That includes "biasing search results in favor of the dominant firm."
"Our country faces a monopoly problem, and American consumers, workers, and businesses are paying the price," Klobuchar said in a statement this week. "We must put policies in place to ensure small businesses and entrepreneurs still have the opportunity to succeed in the digital marketplace."
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to approve the first bitcoin futures ETF next week.
The two ETFs from ProShares and Invesco respectively are expected to start trading next week, and the SEC isn't expected to block them, Bloomberg reports.
The SEC had previously rejected numerous bitcoin ETFs. But these two new products are based on futures contracts and filed under mutual fund rules, which the SEC has indicated it is more likely to approve than previous ETF applications.
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A prominent human rights activist and Saudi dissident is suing Twitter for allegedly hiring two men who acted as spies for the Saudi government. The suit accuses Twitter of negligence in its failure to detect the two spies inside the company — who are currently under indictment from U.S. federal prosecutors — and prevent them from stealing personal information for the Saudi government.
Ali Al-Ahmed, the leader of the human-rights investigation agency Institute for Gulf Affairs, is known as a prominent critic of the current Saudi regime and was granted asylum to remain in the United States in 1998. The suit filed Oct. 14 in the Northern District of California names both Twitter and the two alleged spies as defendants; Al-Ahmed already has a second suit underway against Twitter in the Southern District of New York, where he is claiming that the company's hiring of the two men eventually led to the imprisonment and death of activists in Saudi Arabia.
The two men named in the suit have both been indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors for working at Twitter and passing private information to the Saudi government from 2013 to 2015, one as a site reliability engineer and the other as a media partnerships manager.
The claim filed Thursday in California alleges that Al-Ahmed's personal information, including private conversations and connections with activists in Saudi Arabia, was stolen by these two individuals and sold to the Saudi government, and that Twitter should have known that these two men were unfit employees and should have done more to protect his personal information.
The suit also alleges that Al-Ahmed's Arabic-language Twitter account was suspended in 2018 and has not been reinstated despite multiple attempts at appeal, and accuses the company of keeping Al-Ahmed's account offline because of its interest in maintaining users in Saudi Arabia. "While Twitter may wish to play the victim of state-sponsored espionage, Twitter's conduct in punishing the victims of this intrigue, including Mr. Al-Ahmed, tells a far different story: one of ratification, complicity, and/or adoption tailored to appease a neigh beneficial owner and preserve access to a key market, the KSA," Randy Kleinman, the attorney for Al-Ahmed, wrote in the complaint.
Twitter declined to comment.
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Atlassian will reopen most of its U.S. offices next month, the company told employees Wednesday.
The $103 billion software maker shut down its offices in March 2020 and reopened them briefly in June 2021. In July, the company closed them again as the delta variant brought a resurgence of COVID-19 cases.
Atlassian will reopen its San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Boston and Virginia offices in November, according to an employee who spoke to Protocol on the condition of anonymity. The one U.S. location Atlassian isn't immediately reopening is Austin: That office's lease expires in January, and the company is building out a new Austin office that's set to open in June.
The company's Sydney headquarters is also reopening Nov. 8.
Atlassian isn't requiring employees to return to the office regularly. The company told its workforce last year that they could work remotely forever.
Atlassian didn't immediately comment on its office return plans.
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Coinbase wants Congress to prevent the Securities and Exchange Commission from regulating crypto and turn the job over to a new body, according to a new report.
The crypto marketplace wants Congress to create a special regulator for digital assets, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an internal Coinbase policy document.
Coinbase is planning to make its proposals for crypto regulation public, the report said. The company could not immediately be reached for comment.
Coinbase has been engaged in a public dispute with the SEC under Chair Gary Gensler, who has argued that some crypto currencies should be considered securities and should be covered by investor-protection laws.
Last month, Coinbase cancelled a planned lending feature, after the SEC threatened to sue the company to block the rollout.
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LinkedIn founder and early Facebook investor Reid Hoffman applauded Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen for coming forward and said he is "disappointed" in how the company handled the problems she disclosed to begin with. "It's OK to have done the internal research and not reported it," he said in an interview with Bloomberg. "But you then start the work streams to fix it."
Instead, Hoffman said, Facebook disbanded its civic integrity team that was doing this work. "That doesn't seem like you're working on it," he said. "That doesn't seem like the problem is fixed."
Hoffman also responded to criticism about the company's impact on kids and whether Instagram should be trusted to build a product for children under 13. "They have lost trust for good reasons," Hoffman said. "To regain it, they have to be extra transparent."
Hoffman said he had not yet spoken with Mark Zuckerberg, but said he believes the Facebook CEO will "learn from this." He also called on Facebook to expand the metrics it tracks beyond growth metrics like engagement and sessions. "If we know that certain kinds of content is causing body image issues and other kinds of things, we should add that to our dashboard and we should be measuring to make sure we're having a positive impact, not a negative," he said. "That's the kind of thing I'd want to be hearing from Facebook."
Despite these concerns, Hoffman argued "breaking up is not the answer," saying that splintering tech companies would only give them fewer resources and create "more mayhem."
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Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos wrote an all-staff memo Wednesday night that once again defended the company's decision to stream Dave Chapelle's new comedy special, "The Closer," which has drawn widespread criticism from LGBTQ-plus activist groups.
Critics, including activists within the Netflix community, have called "The Closer" transphobic and argue that it could incite violence against trans people. Sarandos disagreed with that characterization in his memo and defended the company's efforts to stream a wide variety of content. "With 'The Closer', we understand that the concern is not about offensive-to-some content but titles which could increase real world harm (such as further marginalizing already marginalized groups, hate, violence etc.)," he wrote in an email first reported by Variety. "While some employees disagree, we have a strong belief that content on screen doesn't directly translate to real-world harm." His memo compared the effects of content streamed on Netflix to the now generally-debunked theory that violent video games make people who play them more violent.
Several Netflix employees have spoken publicly about their anger and sense of betrayal at the company's decision to stream the show. Three workers, one of whom identifies as trans and has spoken publicly about her anger at the company, were temporarily suspended for trying to attend a Netflix director's meeting without an invitation. "It is absolutely untrue to say that we have suspended any employees for tweeting about this show. Our employees are encouraged to disagree openly and we support their right to do so," a Netflix spokesperson wrote in a statement to Protocol. The trans employee resource group is reportedly planning a company-wide walkout Oct. 20th to protest Sarandos' statements, according to the Verge.
Netflix's LGBTQ+ storytelling Twitter account shared their frustrations Thursday: "This week fucking sucks. To be clear: As the queer and trans people who run this account, you can imagine that the last couple of weeks have been hard. We can't always control what goes on screen. What we can control is what we create here, and the POV we bring to internal conversations."
"Our hope is that you can be hugely inspired by entertaining the world, while also living with titles you strongly believe have no place on Netflix. This will not be the last title that causes some of you to wonder if you can still love Netflix. I sincerely hope that you can," Sarandos wrote in his memo. Netflix is not the first streaming company to face both public and internal backlash over content decisions; Spotify was embroiled in a similar controversy last year when employees asked for editorial control over content produced by Joe Rogan.
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HTC unveiled its new Vive Flow consumer headset Thursday morning, positioning it as a device for meditation, downtime and mental well-being. The headset is priced $499, and can be preordered starting Thursday; it will begin shipping in November.
The Vive Flow is powered by a Qualcomm XR 1 processor, which is less powerful than the chip used by Facebook's $300 Oculus Quest 2. It ships without physical controllers, instead allowing people to use their phone to navigate VR experiences. The headset does offer 6 degrees of freedom, making it possible to "lean into" VR experiences, but there's no support for hand tracking.
Many of these details were first reported by Protocol on Monday; additional details became available through a leak of press images Tuesday.
The Vive Flow may be less powerful than the Quest 2, but HTC did add a few features missing from other VR headsets: The Flow's lenses can be adjusted for people who ordinarily need to wear glasses (although the Quest 2 offers an insert to help people who need glasses), and the integration of Miracast makes it possible to mirror phone-based media apps like Netflix and YouTube to the headset.
The Flow is also extremely light and portable, weighing just 189 grams. However, the latter comes with a significant trade-off: The integrated battery only provides enough power for a few minutes of use, after which the Flow has to be connected to an external battery pack.
Initial reactions among journalists who had been pre-briefed by HTC were mixed, with UploadVR praising the Flow as "by far the lightest and most comfortable VR headset" to date, while The Verge discounted it as "an experiment."
Moor Insights Principal Analyst Anshel Sag also expressed some doubts. "It's a headset with a very clear purpose, but not a great value prop when you see that more-capable headsets are selling for considerably less to consumers," he told Protocol Thursday morning. "The $499 price makes it very hard to justify to most consumers."
Sag mused that the Flow could be a success if it were a lot cheaper. However, HTC may simply not have the resources necessary to sell hardware at cost in the same way as Facebook — something that is reflected in the company's go-to-market strategy for the Flow, he argued. "The fact that HTC is only selling it directly to consumers indicates that the company needs to capture every percent of margin it can get from each headset," Sag said.
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Microsoft will remove its platform for LinkedIn in China later this year because of the difficult internet compliance rules set by the Chinese government, according to a Thursday announcement.
The company plans to replace the specialized LinkedIn China platform, which was designed to obey Chinese government internet rules, with a unique standalone job-seeking site just for people within China, called InJobs. InJobs will not include any kind of social media element and will not allow users to post or share articles or links.
"We're... facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China," wrote Mohak Shroff, a senior vice president of engineering at LinkedIn, in the blog post.
In late September, LinkedIn blocked the profiles of several U.S. journalists in China because they violated "prohibited content" rules under Chinese government censors. LinkedIn was the only remaining major U.S.-based social media company to attempt to support a platform in China that followed the government's censorship rules. "We recognized that operating a localized version of LinkedIn in China would mean adherence to requirements of the Chinese government on Internet platforms. While we strongly support freedom of expression, we took this approach in order to create value for our members in China and around the world," Shroff wrote about the current version of LinkedIn.
Correction: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Mohak Shroff's name. This update was made Oct. 14, 2021.
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Top House Democrats unveiled a bill Thursday that would force big online companies like Facebook and Twitter to face liability if the algorithms that shape their sites push content that drives harm in the real world.
Rep. Frank Pallone, who chairs the House Energy & Commerce Committee, is spearheading this proposal to change Sec. 230. Online services value the legal provision, which protects them from facing legal liability over the content of user posts, and say it protects free speech while allowing them to clean up the worst content. Yet Democratic lawmakers increasingly say the law gives social media companies and other websites too little incentive to police harmful posts.
The bill from Pallone and the chairs of three of his panel's subcommittees would allow services to face liability "when an online platform knowingly or recklessly uses an algorithm or other technology to recommend content that materially contributes to physical or severe emotional injury," according to a news release accompanying the bill.
The proposal follows Senate testimony by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who alleged the site's algorithms focused on presenting the most engaging content, but in the process resulted in harms ranging from fostering political extremism to worsening the mental health of some at-risk young users. Haugen recommended making companies face more legal responsibility for their algorithms, which are at the core of their business, as one solution.
Bills to amend Sec. 230 have become a common way for lawmakers who are fed up with Big Tech to propose changes to the industry, and tech's lobbying operations in Washington are increasingly focused on defending the provision. The companies argue that any change that zeroes in on their knowledge would simply force them to look away from the most violent and abusive content, making the online environment worse rather than better.
Lawmakers have previously passed one change to Sec. 230 into law, which was designed to curb online sex trafficking, but more recent efforts have often split along partisan lines, with Republicans hoping to use changes to force social media companies to keep up more conservative content and Democrats hoping to tackle issues such as health misinformation.
Many proposals for addressing the challenges of social media are politically driven. Bills like Pallone's, which comes from those with subject matter expertise and authority over tech policy, represent a more rare and more potent threat to the companies.
Pallone's office said the bill would "not apply to search features or algorithms that do not rely on personalization," wouldn't touch on web hosting or data storage and would only affect larger companies with five million or more unique monthly visitors.
The introduction came on the same day that a bipartisan group of senators said they would put forward a proposed change to antitrust law for Big Tech, which also signaled high-level determination to curb the platforms.
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