Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy claimed on Thursday that his LinkedIn account had been locked for violating the site's policies, only to have his account reinstated hours later.
A LinkedIn spokesperson told the Washington Examiner Thursday afternoon that Ramaswamy's account was "restricted in error" and is now back up.
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“Your account was restricted for sharing content that contains misleading or inaccurate information, in violation of LinkedIn’s User Agreement” read an email from LinkedIn that Ramaswamy shared on Tuesday.
Ramaswamy posted screenshots of emails he received on LinkedIn, writing “Big Tech election interference has begun.”
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
“These aren’t really the actions of private companies,” Ramaswamy said in a video statement. “These are so-called privately held companies, or publicly traded private companies, that are doing the work of the government through the backdoor — silencing speech that the government would never dare to censor.”
The original messages from LinkedIn cited three video posts as the reason why the entrepreneur's account had been locked. The first, from February, is about the Biden administration’s policies in relation to China, which was flagged for saying “the CCP is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin.”
The other video, also posted in February, was flagged for another comment: “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.”
The final video from May was flagged for saying: “The climate agenda is a lie: fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.”
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“But believe me, I'm not gonna stay censored,” Ramaswamy said. “We're gonna get this done through the national revival that we're leading, starting next year.”
Ramaswamy, the Republican Party’s first millennial White House candidate, is expected to hold a series of events in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on Friday.