Microsoft is pulling the plug on LinkedIn in China almost seven years after its launch, marking the retreat of the final main US-owned social community in China as authorities there additional tighten their management over the Internet sector.

LinkedIn mentioned in a blog post on Thursday that it will exchange the platform later this 12 months with a stripped-down model that might focus solely on jobs, referred to as InJobs, which might not embrace a social feed or share choices.

“While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs and economic opportunity, we have not found that same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed,” LinkedIn mentioned.

“We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”

LinkedIn’s strikes in China have been intently watched as a mannequin for the way a Western social media app may function throughout the nation’s tightly regulated Internet, the place many different platforms reminiscent of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are banned.

The platform expanded in China in 2014, acknowledging on the time that the corporate must censor a number of the content material customers posted on its web site to adjust to Chinese guidelines.

It has been among the many corporations hit over the previous 12 months by a wide-ranging crackdown by Beijing, which has imposed recent curbs on its Internet corporations on areas from content material to buyer privateness. The Chinese authorities has additionally mentioned it desires platforms to extra actively promote core socialist values.

In March, LinkedIn paused new signups in China, saying that it was working to be compliant with Chinese legal guidelines. Two months later, it was amongst 105 apps that was accused by China’s prime web regulator of illegally amassing and utilizing private info and was ordered to make rectifications.

News web site Axios final month reported that LinkedIn had blocked from its Chinese platform the profiles of a number of US journalists and teachers which contained info China considers delicate, citing “prohibited content.”

Microsoft additionally owns Bing, the one main overseas search engine accessible from inside China’s so-called Great Firewall whose search outcomes on delicate subjects are censored.

© Thomson Reuters 2021