“But hear this. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has over 400 million users worldwide and is the tenth most trafficked website in the world…can we really afford not to question these things?”
Over the course of two years, I have developed a LinkedIn portfolio of over 50 published law enforcement-related articles and political opinion editorials for OpsLens.com and LeoAffairs.com, as well as media showcasing my career as a police officer and charity work I have done. During this period, every time an article got published or an accomplishment was made, I would supply a link on my profile to the media so that people could discover my writing and gain exposure to the websites that have given me a platform. The opinions expressed have unquestionably leaned conservative and have been unapologetically from the mind of a street cop, but they are by no means outside of good taste. I do not claim to have a viral following, nor do I present any concrete proof that LinkedIn has singled me out personally for my political leanings. With that being said, I am concerned that the popular professional website has been involved in some questionable practices. Here is simply one writer’s anecdotal evidence.
The problem started back in February of this year when I attempted to link one of my articles to the OpsLens portion of my profile, as I always do. I tried in vain probably two dozen times to link several published articles over the course of about a month, receiving an error message every time. After two weeks, I decided to contact LinkedIn’s support team to help get the problem resolved. I was met with no help and little explanation for why my articles were not being linked to my profile. The only explanation I was given by LinkedIn support was that their engineers were aware of the issue, as it had become a known problem for some users. I was advised that they were working diligently on fixing the problem but could not give a timetable as to when there would be a resolution.
Three days after receiving a response that the site engineers were aware of the problem, I made another attempt to link one of my most recent published articles. What I found was that all media relating to my law enforcement career and all published articles as a contributing writer for both websites had been completely wiped from the respective “experience” sections within my profile. I have painstakingly used LinkedIn in the way I assume most professionals do—as a rolling resume, showcase, and portfolio to highlight important career milestones such as instances where I made the news as an officer, charity boxing matches I fought in, and every article I was able to have published. I at one time held a paid premier membership subscription to LinkedIn, yet to my dismay, the documentation of my life’s work up to that point had vanished into thin air.
More troubling to me was that LinkedIn support closed out the case as if it were resolved. After advising them that the problem was not corrected as they had determined, I was told that the issue was being forwarded to the “research team” to further investigate. I finally decided to ask the support employee this question I had on my mind:
“I have not been contacted yet and am wondering if it is possible that I, being a writer who has been critical of liberal policies and supportive of law enforcement, have anything to do with what is starting to appear to me as censorship. Again, my entire collection of written work, police work, and charity work has been scrubbed from the site. How can it possibly take this long to explain why this happened and to correct the issue?”
One can imagine how LinkedIn responded. Or can you? The first response completely ignored my pointed question and was the generic “Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention” reply. I acknowledged LinkedIn’s circumvention of answering my question in a follow up email and asked it again. This time they responded, “I can assure you the articles have not been removed as any part of censorship…Thank you for your patience.” And then, as if a magician came and pulled my LinkedIn account out of a hat, the problem was resolved. The profile page is finally back up and running normally after all this time, although I think the new format LinkedIn is going with may have been designed by a seven-year-old.
Perhaps I was wrong about LinkedIn. Maybe the message regarding censorship was just enough to bump me up the queue for the problem to get resolved in two months instead of three months. Maybe I’ve read too much Breitbart or Drudge. Maybe I’ve watched one too many snippets on Infowars and Rebel Media. Maybe LinkedIn just has a dismal website engineering and research team. It’s certainly possible.
But maybe I’ve seen too many instances of Facebook censoring conservatism and pushing increasingly left-wing world views or Google changing popular search results when they don’t match the company’s ideological stance. We’re talking about a company who changed their definition of fascism to more closely match a Republican’s presidency.
Maybe I’ve read too much about Mark Zuckerburg picking winners and losers by using his platform to determine what is and isn’t “fake news.” Maybe I was subjected to too much CNN collusion during the presidential election, including DNC Chair Donna Brazile feeding debate questions to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton—a practice that has gone largely unpunished and even spun into “Russia did it!” Now we have RiceGate breaking like a Tsunami wave and “journalists” like Don Lemon refusing to report on its revelations of massive spying for the purpose of political sabotage on behalf of the Obama Administration.
Maybe I’ve seen too many leftist riots called “protests” by our mainstream media. Perhaps I’ve witnessed too many black, female, middle-eastern, or gay conservatives cast out as racists, sexists, Islamophobes, and homophobes because they did not believe what they were “supposed” to believe as people who identified themselves within one of the above-mentioned groups but refused to espouse the tenets of the identity politics being constantly pushed as gospel.
It could even be that all of this happened just as one of my OpsLens articles, which was supportive of President Donald Trump’s pro-law enforcement agenda, got picked up by Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette, a website that attracts 20 million views per month. What better timing to have my entire portfolio removed from the site? I probably shouldn’t have read this user’s article regarding his personal experience with LinkedIn and censorship. I know I shouldn’t have read this Wall Street Journal article about LinkedIn and confirmed Chinese communist censorship of articles. Can someone please take away my tinfoil hat?
I wonder if anyone else has had a similar experience with LinkedIn. I learned from the site’s support message board that many people were having issues with posting new media to their experience section at different times this past year. This information was then confirmed by the support team, as I mentioned above. I do not know the political leaning of others who have shared that experience, but I have yet to learn of anyone whose entire portfolio has been suddenly and mysteriously scrubbed from their profile. Although my research has yielded a disturbing pattern of allegations of bias and censorship tied to LinkedIn, this particular writing is just my personal experience.
I would like to hold out hope that all of the issues I experienced can be chalked up to poor management and bugs galore, but the problem went from bad to worse, and I had to toss a pretty serious allegation out to those guys for anything to be done about it almost two months later. I have not received an explanation for how the issue was remedied and at this point, I don’t believe I’ll get one. I could be wrong with my censorship theory. It definitely wouldn’t be the first time I was. But hear this. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has over 400 million users worldwide and is the tenth most trafficked website in the world from the latest Amazon Alexa numbers. In today’s day and age, can we really afford not to question these things?
T.B. Lefever is an OpsLens Contributor and active police officer in the Metro-Atlanta area. Throughout his career, Lefever has served as a SWAT Hostage Negotiator, a member of the Crime Suppression Unit, a School Resource Officer, and a Uniformed Patrol Officer. T.B. is also a certified Field Training Officer. He has a BA in Criminal Justice and Sociology from Rutgers University. Follow T.B. on Twitter @tblefever.
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