Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy flatly rejected LinkedIn’s claim that his account was locked “in error” this week, in another clash between a conservative politician and Big Tech.
Ramaswamy took to Twitter on Thursday by putting the professional networking platform on blast for claiming he violated the site’s “misinformation, hate speech and violence” policies. The supposedly offending posts slammed President Biden on China and climate change.
Despite multiple appeals over several days, Ramaswamy’s account remained locked, until he made the dust-up public.
The Microsoft-owned company told various news outlets, “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… The account was restricted in error, and it’s now back up.”
Ramaswamy himself mocked LinkedIn, tweeting, “This wasn’t a technical glitch, it was an intentional act of censorship of my views on Biden, China, and climate change.”
“I challenge [Microsoft CEO] @SatyaNadella to publicly condemn LinkedIn’s censorship, or else this is just the beginning of 2024 election interference,” Ramaswamy tweeted Friday.
In response to multiple inquiries, a spokesperson for LinkedIn told Fox News Digital, “As we’ve said, we made an error and restored the account” but declined to elaborate further.
The GOP hopeful then listed the alleged “strikes” he received. The first was a video he shared of himself saying, “The CCP is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin. China has weaponized the woke pandemic to stay one step ahead, and it’s working.” The second was him saying, “If the climate religion was really about climate change, then they’d be worried about shifting oil production from the U.S. to places like Russia and China, yet the climate religion and its apostles in the ESG movement have a very different objective.” The third was him saying, “The climate agenda is a lie. Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.”
He also shared screenshots of communications between his team and LinkedIn which showed that he would only be granted access to his account if he agreed to “abide by LinkedIn’s terms and not to violate them again.”
Ramaswamy remains a long shot in the GOP field, averaging about 3% support according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. That puts him above some other declared candidates but far behind former President Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.