In what LinkedIn execs are now calling a “wildly unfortunate algorithmic hiccup,” the professional networking site managed to label a patriotic pro-ICE post as hateful speech — proving once again that when Big Tech says “professional community,” they mean “utterly baffled community.”
The post, authored by the State Freedom Caucus Network, praised the righteous work of DHS and ICE agents keeping violent criminals off the streets — but somewhere in the binary minds of LinkedIn’s Trust & Safety gremlins it registered as worse than a spammy job recruiter from Moldova.
“Apparently protecting children is ‘hate,’ but letting actual predators roam free is fine,” SCFN sniffed on X before vowing to delete their own account permanently — because nothing says protest like abandoning the most awkward social platform since MySpace.
LinkedIn’s official statement was a masterpiece of corporate doublethink:
“We removed the post because it was hateful.”
“No, wait — actually it wasn’t.”
“It’s fixed now — please keep using LinkedIn to recruit interns.”
At press time, LinkedIn had already issued a follow-up apology, blamed the incident on an “error,” and updated its automated disclaimer to include: “If you can read this, it probably isn’t hateful.”
Conservative users instantly seized the moment: memes of LinkedIn’s confused robot overlords flooded every corner of the internet, recruiters urgently changed their bios to “Non-woke, non-hateful,” and at least eight people reported losing professional connections because someone accidentally un-linked them in protest.
One satirical commentator quipped, “This is why my résumé now lists ‘Anti-Hateful Advocate for ICE Appreciation’ right under ‘Microsoft Word.’” It’s unclear whether this helps lands jobs, but it definitely scares HR bots.
In the end, the whole drama reinforced a simple truth: when social media bots are programmed by people who wouldn’t know patriotism if it applied for a job, the result is chaos — leaks of logic, layoffs of common sense, and professional networks that definitely don’t feel very professional anymore.
And if that isn’t LinkedIn’s new mission statement moving forward? Well, someone will probably mislabel that too.
