(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) The professional-networking social-media site LinkedIn locked out Republican presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy this week for allegedly promoting “misinformation” and “hate speech,” although the online publishing platform failed to clarify how the offending comments were false or harmful.
Ramaswamy went public with his ordeal in a Thursday morning tweet after two days of wrangling with LinkedIn’s nebulous customer-service system, which shed little light on the rationale used to justify censoring a nationally recognized political figure in the midst of a consequential campaign.
Big Tech election interference has begun: @LinkedIn locked my account & censored me this week for posting videos where I expressed fact-based views as a presidential candidate about climate policy and Biden’s relationships with China. They said it violated their policies relating… pic.twitter.com/ND2dFVnGAg
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) May 25, 2023
In an accompanying video, Ramaswamy shared his correspondence with LinkedIn, which claimed he had violated policies related to “misinformation, hate speech, [and] violence.”
Ramaswamy read the three offending posts, none of which appeared to be false. The three statements (also included as a screenshot in the above tweet) dealt with the Biden administration’s relationship with China and with skepticism surrounding the motives of the highly lucrative climate-change movement.
“I’m sure that we’re gonna get this escalated because I’m a U.S. presidential candidate—we have the connectivity to the people that we need to talk to to be able to get my LinkedIn account back,” Ramaswamy said in the video.
“But I’m not bringing about because this is about me,” he continued. “I’m bringing this up because if they can do it to me, they can really do it to anybody for making statements … that are grounded in fact and then express an opinion based on those facts.”
Indeed, as of mid-day Thursday, an account appearing to belong to Ramaswamy was live on LinkedIn, suggesting he had been reinstated.
However, as other platforms—most notably Twitter, following its purchase by red-pilled billionaire Elon Musk—have backed away somewhat from the anti-conservative censorship that pervaded in the leadup to the 2020 election, LinkedIn appears to have doubled down.
The company, which was cofounded by Jeffrey-Epstein-linked Democrat dark-money donor Reid Hoffman, last week attempted to ban the account of Headline USA editor Ben Sellers (the author of this article).
The ban came immediately after a post that called on the New York Times to return the Pulitzer Prize it had received for reporting on the now-thoroughly-debunked Russia-collusion hoax following the publication of the Durham report, which confirmed that the long-running anti-Trump conspiracy had been concocted entirely by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
LinkedIn subsequently claimed its ban was for the use of the word “asshole” in an unrelated comment a day earlier, but only after the piece exposing its censorship was picked up by several prominent conservative media outlets, including ZeroHedge.
Other conservatives revealed to Sellers that they, too, had been censored for spurious reasons.
I was suppressed by LinkedIn during C19 for simply sharing my own, actual story about recovering from C19 naturally and suggesting that for some people, natural might be a better path than experimental gene therapy. Llater suspended for saying it originated in a lab.
— The Okie Economist (@OkieNomics) May 18, 2023
While the issue of social-media censorship has long been a topic of concern for conservatives, the woke tech companies and the government institutions tasked with regulating them had routinely gaslit the public about the scope of the practice prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover.
But the publication of the Twitter Files, along with an accidental admission by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about his company’s collusion with the FBI, revealed that the government had led the effort in many ways, knowingly and willfully engaging in systemic violations of the First Amendment.
According to Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., LinkedIn is among several social-media companies currently under subpoena by the House weaponization subcommittee, although Bishop criticized the slow pace of the investigation in a statement last week to Headline USA.
Accountability may also come through the court system, with the case of Missouri v. Biden having already led to some stunning revalations, despite relentless efforts by the Biden administration to stonewall discovery and thwart the case from proceeding.
Among the shocking admissions that have emerged from depositions of key Democrat officials (including former press secretary Jen Psaki and former COVID czar Anthony Fauci), the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency admitted that CISA classified the thoughts of American citizens as part of the “infrastructure” that fell under its purview for regulation.
Officials in the depositions have not denied any of the actions they took to collude with tech companies in regulating and filtering conservative contents—much of which ultimately proved true—on matters such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.
Rather, they have tried to rationalize those actions by claiming it was done for public “safety” and by claiming, falsely, that the Trump administration also coordinated with social media companies to censor controversial viewpoints.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.
