TCAP Presents... LinkedIn - An Arse-Kisser Safe Haven - The Cummins Accountability Project

You log on like you’re going to a networking event and instead you find the same curated buffet of corporate compliments – people polishing each other’s reputations with the fervour of catechists. LinkedIn sells itself as a professional salon – but the real business is social lubrication. Praise gets you visibility; dissent gets you a soft block, a verification loop, a quiet slide into irrelevance. It’s a safeplace for arse kissers – and if you rock the boat, the platform’s gentle machinery will chew you up and spit you out.

TCAP wrote about the soft block and the verification loop in “TCAP vs LinkedIn” – and that matters. My experience isn’t an isolated glitch – it’s performance art by algorithm. This piece picks up where we left off – same fight, same tactics, broader stain.

The House That Hides Behind ‘Professionalism’

LinkedIn’s language is comforting – ‘community’, ‘professionalism’, ‘opportunity’. Underneath is a product that monetises who you are and sells access to who you know. It’s not neutral. It’s not impartial. It extracts attention, data and goodwill – then launders them into ad revenue and corporate influence.

Privacy scandals have shown how porous that house really is. Public profiles scraped by the million – sold and resold in hacker forums – show the platform’s greatest weakness is its open-door policy with the world’s worst actors. The company likes to call some of these incidents ‘scrapes’ not ‘breaches’ – semantics that matter to lawyers but not to the people who wake up to find their professional history on a criminal market.

The Data Graveyard – Scrapes, Dumps, Repeats

LinkedIn has been repeatedly implicated in massive scraping incidents – hundreds of millions of profiles extracted and peddled online. It’s the kind of mass-harvest that looks like vendor research until someone uses the pile of CVs to phish, scam or stalk. The platform insists much of the content is public – but public doesn’t mean fair game for monetisation and malicious resale.

The GDPR Hit – A Slap With Teeth

The European regulator handed LinkedIn a serious rebuke – a major fine and an order to change how it processes data for targeted advertising. The message was blunt – you can’t cloak behavioural profiling under vague privacy notices and hope regulators won’t notice. It wasn’t a tiny slap – it was regulatory realpolitik showing the company’s practices had clear legal consequences.

Lawfare Over Public Data – The hiQ Fight

When scraping gets contested, LinkedIn goes to law. The long fight with hiQ Labs over whether scraping public profiles is lawful became a landmark case – lawyers jousted, judges split, and the public watched as two visions of the web collided. One side said public profiles are public property – the other said platforms can and should control access when the extraction harms users. In practice, the battleground of scraping shows how power and law twist around control of public information – and LinkedIn is playing for keeps.

China, Censorship and the Shape of Compromise

LinkedIn’s attempt to operate in China was textbook compromise. It adapted to local censorship – and faced criticism for censoring certain political content. Eventually the social feed was pulled and the company pivoted to a jobs-only product. It revealed the ugly truth – global platforms either bend to authoritarian rules or they leave. LinkedIn tried to have it both ways – and only proved what happens when a platform chooses market over values.

Scams, Fake Recruiters and the Rotten Economy of Trust

Recruiters get fake. Profiles get faked. Job offers turn out to be scams. The platform has become a hunting ground for fraudsters who exploit a professional pretence of trust. People looking for work are prey. Account hijacks, extortion schemes and fake recruiter scams are now routine warnings in consumer alerts. The platform’s verification and trust signals are paper-thin – and when they fail the fallout is real.

State Actors, Spycraft and False Identities

It’s not just garden-variety scammers – state-linked actors have used crafted LinkedIn personas to target and recruit. From intelligence operations that mimicked LinkedIn pages to nation-state campaigns using the platform for espionage – the networked, professional veneer makes it an ideal grooming ground for people with bad intent.

Reputation Policing – Algorithms and Quiet Censorship

If you speak up and you’re inconvenient, LinkedIn’s tools are elegantly bureaucratic – a verification loop, a soft block, a nudged invisibility. The effect is chillingly effective: dissenters lose reach, voices that offend boardrooms get deprioritised, and the same polished narratives bubble to the surface. The platform’s moderation is opaque – decisions are made behind screens, explanations thin, and appeals bureaucratic. For anyone challenging corporate power, the risk is simple – be marginalised until you disappear.

Accountability and the Corporate Umbrella

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft – a gigantic corporate umbrella that has different incentives than a small social startup. The platform’s reach and the parent’s scale mean mistakes are systemic, not accidental. When regulators push back or journalists pry, LinkedIn often responds like a corporate PR machine – wording, denials, then incremental fixes. The mechanism is familiar – obfuscate, then comply in the smallest sense necessary to appease regulators.

TCAP, The Loop and the Fight To Be Heard

This is where our “TCAP vs LinkedIn” piece matters – the loop, the soft block, the algorithmic shrug. Our experience is proof that LinkedIn’s reputation-first SOP can be used to quiet people who are inconvenient. You don’t even have to say anything offensive, just going against corporate narrative is enough to be given the gentle shove by these dick heads.

Conclusion – Don’t Fall For The Wallpaper

LinkedIn sells professional polish and offers real networking value especially if you’re a sycophant – but it’s equally a marketplace for surveillance, scams and corporate crowd control. If you come for opportunity, be aware you’re trading bits of yourself for a chance to be seen. And if you come to speak inconvenient truths, be prepared to be shrugged off and silenced by a machine that prefers applause.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project

TCAP Presents… LinkedIn – An Arse-Kisser Safe Haven