On February 4, 2022, I logged in to my LinkedIn account and collided with the following message:
The beauty of this message (coming as it did with neither notice nor further explanation) is that it is crisp, simple to understand, and affords absolutely no room for discussion. I did something LinkedIn does not like, end of story. Bad boy!
I have yet to understand how I earned their wrath, and I don’t know why they took this step now, but, like a recalcitrant naif, I have one and only one recourse: do exactly what LinkedIn says and pray that they give me back access to more than 15 years of carefully curated contacts and discussions.
The Nature of the Purge
The purge was as complete as it was silent. In one fell swoop, every aspect of my relationship with LinkedIn was wiped from the public face of their site, together with any external links to my content and any history of my LinkedIn presence whatsoever. This included:
Contacts - I no longer had access to any of my contacts on the site. More importantly, none of my contacts were told of this restriction. Those contacts that noticed my departure have been contacting me through alternate means to this day, unsure whether I had suddenly and inexplicably left the site, was deplatformed, or maybe even just died.
Conversations - All my comments in other people’s conversations disappeared, at times leaving disconcerting traces where someone’s response to my comment remained in the system, but my own comment was gone. Like light bending around a black-hole, people could infer my one-time presence on LinkedIn, but no more.
Who needs an explanation?
This was not my first brush with LinkedIn censorship. Over the years, LinkedIn has censored a variety of posts, including (for example) a few of my own referring to:
A news article citing Galia Rahav (MD and Prof. at Tel Aviv University) challenging the value of Israel’s Green Pass system during the surge of the COVID-19 Omicron variant.
A video of Yale Professor of Epidemiology Harvey Risch providing his candid thoughts about the government’s handling of early treatment for COVID-19.1
An article by Alex Gutentag in the daily online magazine Tablet discussing how COVID-19 restrictions hurt most the poorest and most vulnerable members of society.
No explanation was ever given, and notification was rare and inconsistent.
At times, I would receive an e-mail saying that a post had been restricted because it “go[es] against our Professional Community Policies, https://www.linkedin.com/legal/professional-community-policies”. In such cases, the site would offer me an opportunity to request a “second look”, but it was almost always2 rejected without comment.
At other times, I got no notification whatsoever, but I could see a notice if I returned to the post. Yet other times, and this was my favorite, there was no notice anywhere - my contacts would suddenly message me that the post had just disappeared into the Internet ether.
Last, but not least, some articles simply and inexplicably got almost no views whatsoever (despite thousands of contacts to my account!), most likely as a result of shadow banning.
In defense of the tyrant
From a corporate position, LinkedIn’s approach to perceived policy violation is understandable if not reasonable. Every banned crank is a potential lawsuit, and the less ammunition (i.e., explanation) one provides to the enemy the better. Moreover, if the person did actually post something dangerously inappropriate, then eliminating all trace of the person, including the offending material, seems like an appropriate way to mitigate potential liability and damage from the post.
Except that the company most likely does not have any real liability, as “Section 230 of the Comunications Decency Act aptly protects companies like LinkedIn from legal liability for the comments of their users.” (see Censoring Science). Moreover, some of the posts that LinkedIn is censoring (see above) are dangerous only to the state of public ignorance, and perhaps the reputation of those who have staked out untenable positions. The behavior smacks more of speech and narrative control than risk mitigation.
Solutions
Since my mysterious disappearance from LinkedIn, a number of contacts have reached out over e-mail, asking what can be done about this behavior.
Defense
First and foremost, LinkedIn and most other social media companies should be treated as adversaries (in a cybersecurity sense) rather than benevolent patrons. You are not the customer or client … you are their product, and you must take active precautions to protect your relationship and interests.
This means that, where possible, you should regularly backup all of your content to an off-site environment;3 this should be possible for most sites that operate in Europe, as they must abide by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation on data portability. However, it also means that you should have a backup mechanism for reconnecting with your contacts, especially those that are essential for work or daily living.
Do this … today.
Be loud
The second approach is to complain … loudly. It is not only democracy that dies in darkness, but all of civil liberties, and the converse seems also true. That is how South African apartheid was toppled and Jews were released from the former Soviet Union: loud, public outcry that shines a bright disinfecting light on the immoral behavior.
This works even on LinkedIn, as demonstrated by the case of Martin Kulldorff, the Harvard epidemiologist whose account appears to have been restricted at the same time as mine. All it took was a well-written public complaint by Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute for the account to be reinstated in a matter of hours.
Think where you work
The third solution is perhaps the hardest: think carefully about where you work. Companies that silence external dissent are likely to also silence internal dissent.4 When you work for a company that behaves immorally, it is hard to escape the conclusion that you are contributing to the behavior.
I understand the considerations. Jobs are an essential component of modern living, and the big tech companies (like LinkedIn, or its parent Microsoft) pay their engineers quite generously. Indeed, I am not in a position to judge anyone’s decision to work for these companies5 … but, in my view, it is worth including the moral calculus into your employment deliberations.
Substack to the rescue?
All this leads to substack, where I have now landed with many of my LinkedIn pieces that have been restored from backups.
Could it happen here?
Could substack, perhaps under public of financial pressure, turn to the dark censoring impulses of LinkedIn over time? The answer, in my mind, is unequivocally YES. A look at their terms of use showcase all sorts of troubling elements, for example:
Content Guidelines - Substack has some of the same kinds of free speech killer possibilities as other sites, including clauses like “We don’t allow content that promotes harmful … activities…”. Is discussing the potential ineffectiveness of community masking during a pandemic “harmful” or is it science?
“[Substack has] the exclusive right to interpret and enforce these guidelines” and “we may remove it, hide it from public view, or impose other restrictions” (just like LinkedIn).Acceptable Use - Substack’s publishing guidelines also include vague legalisms (interpreted by them alone) restricting my ability to publish content that is “deceptive, … harassing, … or misappropriates any law, statute, ordinance or regulation or rights of any third party”. How does one misappropriate a regulation? Would encouraging the feeding of pigeons in Venice count?
Privacy - Substack’s privacy policy is right out of the eavesdropper’s playbook (although, sadly, not much different from many other websites). The site claims to record all sorts of personal information, beyond just your name and e-mail and reaching into your location, photograph, and “information related to the browser or device”. They may share this information with just about anyone from affiliates to prospective sellers and buyers, and, if they go out of business or sell the company, who knows!
On their face, these elements may be reasonable and even prudent, but the devil is in the details. Who decides what is acceptable? What due process is there for controversial decisions? What recourse is there for the accused?
For now, my only solace is that other people of much greater prominence are vested in this model, including Bari Weiss, Alex Berenson, and eugyppius.
If substack falls to the dark side, at least I will be in good company.
Acknowledgments at footnotes.
The author would like to thank the following people (and those who refused to be acknowledged) for their feedback:
Ethan, a Stanford educated software engineer based in Silicon Valley, who has had a similar experience.
Daniel Thumim
Julie
Anonymous
The full video is, alas, subscriber-walled.
There was actually one exception in my more than fifteen years on the platform. One of my censored posts caught the attention of a second-degree contact, who publicly alerted LinkedIn Help to the absurdness of the decision. Someone at the company then reversed the censorship, but my subsequent post alerting the community to the originally censored post was thereafter also censored. When I asked for a “second look” of the subsequent post (citing the earlier decision), I got my one and only reprieve using this mechanism.
As of my last use, LinkedIn does provide an “export” capability buried deep within their settings, but it is quite imperfect. For example, it does not preserve some images, and many of the posted links are rerouted through LinkedIn’s URL shortener, which is no longer accessible with a “restricted” account.
I have no scientific reference for this … it is, admittedly, my own opinion based on my limited personal experience.
As they say in Hebrew, המבין יבין.
Hi Ari, I'm glad you and I - somehow - kept the ability to connect. I checked my contacts - our connection goes back to Sept 2020, early days for me, when it comes to LinkedIn.
I'm sorry for your sudden abrupt loss.
I've always been cautious in what I post on LinkedIn - and yet some of my pieces got such low views that it was clear it was almost certainly shadow banned.
I have been amazed that my content around the truckers - like my visit to Ottawa - got such wide distribution. Almost 29,000 views. I wonder: will LI be going back, and retroactively censor? As for when I posted that first piece, I wondered then: will this be shadow banned? Instead, it appeared that it got the reverse - huge exposure. We will see.
Substack. I have been seeing more and more people using substack, and opened an account a couple of weeks ago, but have not posted anything yet. Thank you for going over the local rules. I thought that might be the case, and so haven't been eager to put content here.
All the best to all of us who care and do what we can.
Again, I'm delighted that you didn't just disappear, as has happened to many people, but that there is this new connection space.
Elsa
Slashdot is now reporting a similar phenomenon on Facebook ... what took them so long?
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/04/03/1956234/facebook-users-angry-after-accounts-locked-for-no-reason