A new report now confirms what MRC Free Speech America has recorded in its exclusive CensorTrack database: LinkedIn’s censorship apparatus targeted its users based on “political bias.”
The Fair Election Fund evaluated Microsoft-owned LinkedIn’s transparency reports as part of its assessment of “Corporate Influence & Election Integrity Concerns with Microsoft.” Part of the report analyzed the career-oriented social networking platform’s approach to censorship over the past seven years. The Fair Election Fund’s analysis found that LinkedIn’s content moderation actions pointed toward “political bias,” especially as censorship surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Censorship on LinkedIn exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic when it created its “misinformation” policy. The Fair Election Fund noted that when the platform drafted the policy, it mandated that “any content contradicting the World Health Organization (WHO)” be removed.
The number of posts that LinkedIn removed under the new policy peaked at 355,012 in 2021. The Fair Election Fund’s report concluded that “[t]he policy’s broad application likely drove the 2020-2022 peak, censoring dissenting opinions regardless of evidence.”
Indeed, nearly half of the LinkedIn entries in MRC’s CensorTrack database are COVID-19-related censorship. In many cases, the platform removed posts by medical doctors and researchers like Dr. Robert Malone, who is credited as the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, Harvard University Medical School epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Dr. Marty Makary, who now serves as the Trump administration’s FDA Commissioner. The censorship also has not stopped as MRC researchers continue to find cases of LinkedIn censoring content related to the COVID-19 vaccines.
The report also noted that censorship on LinkedIn increased dramatically in recent years. The Fair Election Fund compared the amount of censorship LinkedIn employed during President Donald Trump’s first term versus Joe Biden’s presidency.
The group found that in 2019, the platform censored over 2,000 posts for being allegedly “hateful or derogatory,” and in 2020, the platform removed over 16,000 posts. The number nearly doubled during Biden’s first year in office in 2021 and rose to nearly 100,000 in 2022. It hit an all-time high in 2024 when it nearly doubled again. The Fair Election Fund noticed similar trends when examining content LinkedIn deemed “harassment and abusive.”
This increase in censorship, although huge, is not surprising considering the fact that Twitter (now X), Facebook and now YouTube have all admitted that they censored content at the behest of the Biden administration. The Media Research Center further explained in a bombshell report detailing the Biden administration’s 57 heinous censorship initiatives that the FBI was meeting with major Big Tech companies, including LinkedIn. These relationships with the FBI are what led Twitter and Facebook to censor the New York Post’s stories on Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
The Fair Election Fund’s report also noted that there was significantly more content removed during the 2022 and 2024 elections, where Republicans outperformed Democratic candidates, than there was during the 2020 election, where Democrats surged. The Fair Election Fund found that these discrepancies indicate that “[c]riticism of President Trump and his policies may have been allowed, while criticism of President Biden and his policies was aggressively moderated as 'hateful and derogatory.’”
The Fair Election Fund’s conclusion supports MRC’s own findings when a 2022 study uncovered 646 times Big Tech censored criticism of Biden.
Free speech is under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
Image above credited to Tobias Dziuba
