Vivek Ramaswamy, who has surged to third place in 2024 GOP presidential nomination polling behind former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, was locked out of his LinkedIn account for alleged “misinformation,” a report said.
The entrepreneur’s account was blocked for more than a week over three posts deemed offensive by LinkedIn, Reclaim The Net reported on May 25.
The offending posts, according to LinkedIn:
• “The CCP is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin.”
• “If the climate religion was really about climate change, then they’d be worried about, say, shifting oil production from the U.S. to places like Russia and China.”
• “The climate agenda is a lie: fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.”
“I was a bit surprised to get an email noting that my LinkedIn account had been shut down,” Ramaswamy said in a video. “I wondered why, ‘cause actually a number of friends texted me saying they follow me on LinkedIn. That’s how they keep up. They weren’t able to find me anymore.”
Ramaswamy, the author of “Woke, Inc.” said he asked LinkedIn: “Can you please clarify what is misleading in any of these statements made?”
A LinkedIn official responded on May 24 by saying, in part: “We don’t tolerate misinformation, hate speech, violence or any form of abuse on our platform. We understand that this might not be the response you wanted, but we work to apply our policies in a fair and consistent way for all of our members.”
“It’s remarkable that expressing fact-based views on climate policy and China-related policy, including legitimate criticism of President Biden, would result in outright censorship by a Microsoft-owned social media company,” he added. “This is the embodiment of what’s wrong in America: an arranged marriage between large tech companies and the left that together accomplishes what neither could alone. I was one of the first critics of the government using tech companies to silence speech that the government could not censor directly. It feels like karma that those tech companies are now censoring me for criticizing the government whose hand lurks behind many of their actions.”
A LinkedIn spokesperson later added, “The account was restricted in error and it’s now back up,” but did not clarify what the error was.
Ramaswamy went on to discuss how other individuals who don't have prominent platforms like his likely would not be so lucky when they get censored by tech giants.
“Now, I gotta kick out of this, I’m gonna be honest. I’m sure that we’re gonna get this escalated because I’m a U.S. presidential candidate,” he said. “We have the connectivity to the people that we need to talk to to be able to get my LinkedIn account back. But I’m not bringing this about because it’s about me. I’m bringing this up because if they can do it to me, they can really do it to anybody for making statements about the climate change movement and agenda in this country that are grounded in fact, and then express an opinion based on those facts to make a statement about Biden’s relationships with China and criticize his China policies as a result.”
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