China says

In an effort to stop possible protestors from accessing Twitter, China blocked LinkedIn with their “Great Firewall” of internet censorship for a few days. Facebook and Twitter are taboo in the tightly controlled country. Some tech savvy professionals have been able to route through other severs and avoid the censors but for most large social networking sites are inaccessible via the Chinese Internet.

LinkedIn had been permissible for professionals to use based on its purpose and comparatively smaller demographic. Some people in China however have not been using the site to network professionally or seek employment. They have found because LinkedIn is fully integrated with Twitter, that they can view messages and post tweets without having to be so smart as to understand difficult-to-use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or proxy servers that others use to access Twitter.

The block began corresponding with an increase of pro-democracy demonstrations. Officials believed that several "Jasmine Revolution" protests were arranged via LinkedIn as well as the banned Boxun.com. Shortly before the firewall went into effect a user known as Jasmine J set up a group called “Jasmine Voice” and posted messages like "OMG, some pro-democracy fighters really did something here after the triumph of Egypt."

For fear of government upheaval, those in power have already blocked the word “jasmine” from China’s search engines like Sina.com. Now database inquiries relating to U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman are being filtered as well with the charge that he supports the efforts of protestors in China’s Jasmine Revolution.

Jay Ritter, a professor of finance at the University of Florida mused about affects Chinese censorship could have on the company, “If the disruption for LinkedIn is permanent in China, it could hurt the company's prospects as an IPO as a ban would exclude the company from the world's largest Internet market--about 450 million users and growing. It certainly would be a negative in terms of the company's future growth and profitability. This is something where investors would take it into account and be willing to pay a little lower price per share." Fortunately for LinkedIn share holders the site ban was at least temporarily lifted after a few days.

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By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a multimedia developer with experience in web, film, photography and animation as well as traditional fine arts like painting and sculpting. In addition to writing for TechCareersBlog.com, she is co-founder of design and promotion company, Creative Kazoo with fellow Nexxt blogger, Staci Dennis. Heather’s spare time consists of making puppets, teaching Sunday School, building Legos and doing science experiments with her children.