Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy asserted Thursday that “Big Tech election interference has begun,” sharing that Microsoft-owned social media company LinkedIn has “locked” his account as it claimed he posted “misleading or inaccurate information.”
Update: In a statement to Breitbart News on Thursday afternoon, a LinkedIn spokesperson noted, “The account was restricted in error and it’s now back up.”
In a video posted to his social media on Thursday morning, Ramaswamy noted that he learned from friends who keep up with him on the app that his account was restricted. His team reached out to LinkedIn and learned the company concluded that he posted three videos that contained “misleading or inaccurate information.”
In a screenshot of the message from LinkedIn shared by the candidate, the company points to specific quotes he made in the videos.
“The CCP is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin. China has weaponized the ‘woke pandemic’ to stay one step ahead of us. And it’s working,” the first quote from a video posted on February 5 reads.
Big Tech election interference has begun: @LinkedIn locked my account & censored me this week for posting videos where I expressed fact-based views as a presidential candidate about climate policy and Biden’s relationships with China. They said it violated their policies relating… pic.twitter.com/ND2dFVnGAg
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) May 25, 2023
The company took issue with another comment from February 16, when he stated, “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. Yet, the climate religion and its apostles in the ESG movement have a different objective.”
Finally, the document referenced a third video from May 7 where he asserted, “The climate agenda is a lie: fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.”
Ramaswamy said the “three strikes” were “staggering.”
When his team “pushed back,” Ramaswamy said he “got specifics” that he violated policies of “hate speech, misinformation, and violence.”
He added he is sure his account would be reinstated, considering his campaign has “connectivity to the people we need to talk to be able to get my Linked-In account back,” but that that is beside his point:
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, to say that that’s gotta be characterized as ‘misinformation, hate speech, and violence,’ per LinkedIn’s terms of service – this is a Microsoft-owned company, so it shows what’s going on this country.
Ramaswamy continued, pointing to what he sees as an informal partnership of private corporations and the government to censor speech:
These aren’t really the actions of private companies. These are so-called privately held companies or publicly-traded private companies that are doing the work of the government though the back door, silencing speech that the government would never dare censor, could never censor under the Constitution… That’s even more dangerous than direct government censorship in many ways because it is a hybrid of corporate power and state power together, doing what neither one of them could do on their own. That’s really what this is about.
The Republican’s Iowa Bus Tour is set to resume on Friday in Cedar Rapids before stops in Urbandale, Des Moines, and Osceola on Saturday.
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