On living as an unemployed pariah after being permanently banned from LinkedIn and why this should concern everyone

By JD Goulet

Summer 2023 (original publication date unknown)

Until March 2023, I’d never heard of the term “shadowban,” and the thought that I could be suddenly and without warning, explanation, or recourse be permanently cut off from my professional network, over 15 years of my own written content, and the ability to connect with current and new clients and employers had never crossed my mind. But about 3 days before my move to Portugal, it happened to me—I got permanently banned from LinkedIn.

Months later, I’m still shocked by what happened, and now facing financial instability due to the egregious abuse of corporate power. It’s been such an emotionally fraught incident that I’ve dreaded writing about it, much as I know how important it is to do so, because it brings a lot of painful emotions and rage to the surface to even think about the injustice of what happened.

Before I delve into the specifics of my forced exile from LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft, by the way, which is one of my off and on clients since 2017) and what this means for society in general, I believe it’s important to give you some background about myself to show how incredibly absurd it is that I, a highly respectable member of my community, was permanently banned from LinkedIn, with the point being that if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, including you. So a bit about me:

• I served on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood of Eastern Washington and North Idaho and various other boards and committees over the years.
• I co-founded and led a community-based secular 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Tri-City Freethinkers, for a decade.
• I was, at the time of my removal from the platform, working on a project about professional networking (oh, the irony) for Harvard Business Publishing.
• I was my former county’s chairperson of the Democratic party.
• I ran for the Washington State Legislature three times.
• I’ve been a guest speaker, guest columnist, podcast guest, forum moderator, activism coordinator, issue advocate, grassroots lobbyist, and more, but perhaps most ironically, I was interviewed in 2022 as a subject matter expert on diversity, equity, and inclusion for a book written by a LinkedIn marketing employee that is due out this summer.

I have spent many sleepless nights speculating about what thing or combination of things I could have done that warranted my being permanently banned from LinkedIn, but in the end, I have no way of knowing. And that is quite possibly the most troubling part about the whole thing. (But, as you will see, I do have my suspicions.) After going through the process of uploading my ID and appealing the decision, the final word came from Alfred, who would only say that my account was permanently restricted “Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations.” What violations? I don’t know.

I think Alfred might want to reconsider the life choices that have led him to becoming a billionaire’s henchman.

What I can tell you are some of the things that were happening on LinkedIn around this time:

1. Fake accounts posting AI-generated content, and content blatantly plagiarized from actual human users, seemed to be proliferating on the platform. Trying to report them was like playing Whack-a-Mole and was ultimately futile because LinkedIn responded every single time that the accounts were not in violation of community standards. It didn’t matter how much I showed evidence that the accounts were fake (I kept all the screen shots I obtained as evidence) and stealing other people’s posts, their moderators either lacked the intellectual capacity to distinguish between fake and real people or worse, they did not care.
2. Transphobic posts and comments were running rampant on the platform and LinkedIn moderators were repeatedly telling those of us who reported the comments for violating community standards that they weren’t, in fact, violating community standards. But try to use their own logic against them, and you will be found to be in violation.

This still shocks me to this day. LinkedIn determined it was perfectly okay for this man to claim that all trans people are responsible for excluding predators who “choose to identify” as trans if they want to be treated with dignity and fairness, but when I point out the absurdity of that statement by comparing it to treating all Christians like second-class citizens and criminals because so many actual clergy members have been repeatedly caught sexually abusing children, I’m the one who gets my comment removed?!?! It’s absurd!!!

3. In February, I received a harassing DM out of the blue from a former male coworker (who had always been an awful asshole to me) that I had, thankfully, not heard from since he got dismissed in 2017. I reported it to LinkedIn and they did nothing whatsoever. Not satisfied with their inaction, I then posted a screen shot of his DM to me with a message about how it was unconscionable that LinkedIn was ignoring the abuse and they removed my post with a warning to me that I was violating community standards. I appealed and eventually someone there came to their senses and restored the post. They made no apology, by the way, and they still did absolutely nothing to address the harassment. I literally missed a day of work due to this incident because I was so distraught by how incredibly bonkers the whole situation was.

He always was an asshole, but I had no idea he was a use-a-professional-networking-site-to-harass-a-former-coworker-out-of-the-blue level of asshole.

4. As laws targeting transgender people were ramping up in the U.S., many trans professionals began to speak out about what this was doing to the wellbeing of trans employees and employees with trans kids. And more and more of us started to notice that our posts about this were being suppressed by the algorithm, something I would later come to learn has a term: shadowbanning. I could post about something uncontroversial and get 50 reactions, but if I posted anything that used the word “trans” in it I’d get one or two reactions. This prompted a post from me 3 days before I was permanently banned from the platform:

LinkedIn’s reaction to being called out for silencing trans voices was to… checks notes… ban the trans person calling them out. Got it. Cool cool.

And trans people aren’t the only ones who have been complaining about being shadowbanned. I learned that this is something that’s been experienced for awhile now by Black DEI practitioners as documented here, here, and in many other places. (And it’s not just LinkedIn, of course, but pretty much all social media has been guilty of biased algorithms silencing the voices of marginalized people, including Instagram and Facebook, like this disabled trans advocate and this Black trans woman.) And I would later learn that shadowbanning can be a warning sign that you are in danger of receiving a permanent ban.

Now, in the weeks leading up to this, I had remarked to my fiancée that the overall tone of LinkedIn posts seemed to be dramatically shifting. It had gone from sterile, fluorescent-bulbs-in-the-cubicle-farm vibes only to “OMG, the orcas are destroying our ship!” vibes in a very short period of time. She speculated that as Twitter had started hindenburging around that time that its passengers of all ideological stripes needed new outlets to air their grievances, and so LinkedIn, for better or worse, became one of those platforms.

This is probably a good point to mention that its because of the increased level of harassing behavior, hateful posts, and a platform choosing to ignore the dumpsterfire in their living room that I chose to change my profile picture from one showing my face to a queer Jolly Roger avatar ("Our Flag Means Death" was trending around this time), which at the time I didn’t realize was against their terms of service. You must show your real face, it turns out, but if that was the reason they eventually banned me, seems like some pretty serious overkill, especially since they could have simply let me know and I could have begrudgingly uploaded my face again, even if it did potentially endanger me.

Another possible strike against me, but one that happened many months before all of this, is that I changed my first name to my initials because JD is the name I, an agender person, use both professionally and personally and is the name I'm published under in Harvard Business Review. Now, technically this puts me in violation of their terms of service because they require their users to use their legal name, and though JD is based on my legal initials and I used my real legal last name, when they required me to upload my ID to prove I’m me, JD does not match the legal first name on that ID. But since they didn’t give me any reason for the ban, nor did they allow me to offer any defense (Of what? Who knows?!), I can only surmise this wasn’t the reason.

No, I can only conclude that they find transphobic bigots to be more profitable at the end of the day than a mouthy neurodivergent, disabled, agender, queer person. And that brings me to remind or inform people that many corporations sided with Hitler in pre-WWII Germany. I was going to go into the history of this here, but this newsletter is already really long and plenty of actual historians have documented this fact, like here and here and... oh hell, just search the topic in any browser, it’s very well-known history that fascists and corporations go together like peanut butter and jelly. Hell, Netflix even has an entire show called Transatlantic in which that’s a key plot point and you really should go check it out. It’s amazing (but also… support the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikers!)

Lest you think it’s not a huge deal to get banned from LinkedIn, let me tell you some of the ways this has affected me beyond the emotional affront. I am facing ongoing financial punishment and could potentially face deportation. You see, since LinkedIn has become so globally ubiquitous in the job seeking and professional networking space, it turns out that not having a presence there can make keeping a roof over your head a lot harder.

I need to inject some relevant back story here for context. In another egregious turn of events, shortly after I moved to Portugal, my previously mentioned client decided to end my contract with a month’s notice and then management proceeded to treat me so unprofessionally that I left of my own accord 3 weeks before the end. Every client I’ve had since 2017 I connected with via LinkedIn, so with that possibility taken from me, I’ve had to turn to other means of finding my next paying gig. But it turns out that no matter where you go to job hunt, pretty much every company asks for a link to your LinkedIn profile. In fact, a good many online applications have that as a required field and you cannot submit an application without including the link. I’ve even found blogs written by recruiters who warn that not having a presence on LinkedIn is a red flag to many would-be employers. (Also, can I just say how uncomfortable and embarrassing it’s been to meet professionals who ask me to connect on LinkedIn and I must find some painfully awkward, brief way to explain that I can’t do that.)

Furthermore, in the months leading up to my international move, I’d networked with several professionals in the EU with whom I’d had conversations on LinkedIn about meeting up once I got settled in to collaborate on projects, etc., only I didn’t have the foresight to get their off-LinkedIn contact information since I had no idea what was about to happen, so those opportunities are lost, too. I’d also been asked to be a moderator of a multi-day neurodiversity forum held on LinkedIn, but I couldn’t participate! I could list several other examples of the many ways that this has hampered my ability to make a living and be an engaged, productive member of my community, both offline and on, but again, this has already gotten so long, and I haven’t even told you about how devastating it was to lose over 15 years of the content I’d written on LinkedIn!

“Well, why not just create a new account?” you might be wondering. Believe me, I did. The first account I created immediately after getting the email that my appeal failed. I used my full legal name that time. I had just started to painstakingly recreate my network from what people I could recall from memory when I got blocked from that account, as well. A couple of months later, after getting settled in Portugal and losing my job, I decided to give it another go, this time using a fake name since using my real one hadn’t worked out (recall, they made me upload my ID). I didn’t bother trying to add anyone to my network, I just wanted to be able to see job listings. But that account got blocked, too. (Which is really pretty creepy when you think about it, because it makes one wonder what kind of under-the-hood techy voodoo are they using to connect that new account to a formerly banned user?)

After my ban, I wrote to ProPublica, the ACLU, my U.S. Senators, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but what with the U.S. in a perpetual state of crisis right now, everyone has their standing-up-to-bullies hands full. I started searching to find out what others have experienced or done, and oh boy did I find a lot of other people have also been surprised to wake up one day and find themselves permanently banned, like this person who wrote about their experience of getting banned from LinkedIn on Vice and this person who also wrote about why this is a really bad thing. There’s even a Facebook group that formed where the outcasts started discussing a possible class action lawsuit, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. And good luck finding an attorney with the resources to take on LinkedIn (again, owned by Microsoft). And the only one who wins in a class action lawsuit is the law firm, in any case.

I don't want to allow them to get away with this! When a private company performs a vital public function, as LinkedIn clearly does, it is imperative that they not be allowed to violate the fundamental rights of the citizens of the countries in which they operate. LinkedIn is currently violating my right to find and engage in employment, and as I’ve now been unemployed for well over a month and I’m watching my bank account dwindle, I’m getting increasingly anxious. And it’s not just the money, though that is more than enough to cause me to lose sleep at night, it has a high potential of causing me and my family members to be denied legal residence in Portugal when we show up to our appointments next month with Portuguese border control and cannot prove we have the foreign-sourced income required for our visas to be approved, on which our legal right to remain in the country hinges. I’m genuinely scared right now because it is not an exaggeration when I say that I’d rather be unalived than be sent back to the United States.

Whew! I finally wrote the piece that I’ve been putting off for months because it’s so overwhelming to think about. There are probably details I’ve forgotten about, but it’s already felt like such a complicated tale to tell that I’m going to finally call it good and hit that publish button. If you’ve made it through to the end, thanks for hearing me out.

Be careful on LinkedIn, especially if you start noticing you are being shadowbanned. Back up your content and connections elsewhere, because they won’t give you access to your own data when they unceremoniously boot you for reasons they won’t even tell you about. Join the fight against the corporate and political forces that want to keep you so scared of homelessness and starvation that you’ll be a compliant little worker bee. Support striking workers. Join a union. Support writers like me! And above all, be good to one other.

Update: About six months after I wrote this, LinkedIn suddenly reinstated my account without a word. I will never know why I was banned, but I know I can never trust them again and I no longer engage on that site, though I begrudgingly keep the account open. The problem with bot accounts, plagiarizers, and scammers has only gotten worse. LinkedIn continues to face no meaningful repercussions for any of their abuse. But most importantly, my residence permit was approved and I have now been happily living in Portugal for over two years (though my residence permit renewal date comes up soon and I'm a bit nervous about what's going to happen since I still have no source of income to this day).

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JD Goulet (they/she) is an American-born former corporate writer/editor & learning product designer, political leader, Planned Parenthood board member, and secular movement leader. Throughout her career, she has been an educator and champion for inclusion and wellbeing, especially at the intersection of disability, neurodiversity, sexuality, gender, and class. Their bylines appear in Harvard Business Review, Tumbleweird Magazine, Solarpunk Stories, and various regional publications. She lives in Portugal with her wife and two dogs.

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