As an effect of being laid off, I decided to open a new LinkedIn account. I dislike LinkedIn (and all social media) generally, but beggars can’t be choosers when unemployed. The last time I had a LinkedIn account was a little over 18 months ago. I closed it because I just didn’t find it that useful, and most of the messaging I received was sales-related or recruiters who would send things like this:
“Are you interested in a role in Richmond?”
“I live in the DC area, it’s about 100 miles away from Richmond, so no.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. The location filter tool in LinkedIn kind of sucks.”
So anyway I need to find a job so I decided to open a new account using the same email address. Less than a week after I opened it, I was browsing positions while sitting at Dave’s Hot Chicken (which was just okay) and I was kicked out of the mobile app. I went to sign in again, and LinkedIn prompted me to “verify my identity,” which I had already done through CLEAR, so I was puzzled as to why I was being asked to do this a second time through a different verifier.
Cue a bizarre and kafkaesque process where I sent LinkedIn a picture of my driver’s license, and then had to do a live verification – essentially, a video selfie. After completing these steps, LinkedIn informed me that my account was suspended, and that they should have my “request” (what they mean is the request that got created as part of me sending them a picture of my ID, but if you want to make someone really paranoid this is certainly the exact verbiage to use) to have my account put “back on LinkedIn” in two days. Well, it has now been more than two days.
When I go to the site, it seems to be indicating that my account is suspended because they are not able to verify my identity. When I click “Verify your identity,” I am told that a request is already created to verify my identity. I am not able to contact any kind of support, because in order to contact support, you need to be logged into LinkedIn, which I cannot do because they apparently can’t verify my identity even though I provided it through two different verifying companies. So that’s cool. Maybe I’m in a database somewhere as deceased and I don’t know it. (Spoiler alert: I’m not dead.)
I’m just trying to get a job, man.
I really have no idea if or when they are going to restore my account, or what the problem is. I could simply create another one with a different email address, but I don’t want to give them a reason to ban me from the platform, so I won’t.
At any rate, it’s almost irrelevant, because if anyone wanted to know who I was, they can go to this website, which I have operated for several years. “Yes but how do we know who you are?” Well, I had to buy this domain name, hosting package, and TLS certificate with a credit card in my name. Obviously, anything can be faked, but in aggregate that should be more than what most social sites give you at a glance.
When I was an undergrad at the University of Mary Washington, which was a very long time ago, some very smart and forward-thinking people decided that the future of the web was in owning web presence. They called, and still call, this “Domain of One’s Own.” They were ahead of their time with Domain of One’s Own. At the time, social media services like Twitter (X) were nascent. LinkedIn and Instagram did not exist. Now, each social media service is offering more or less the same experience, there is no realistic avenue for support or help, and because they are so prolific it’s really no wonder that we have instances of “LinkedIn hell.” This is, of course, a separate and more nuanced conversation than the rampant and punishing toxicity plaguing all of these services by generally bringing out the absolute worst in humanity.
This episode with LinkedIn is not unique to the internet, or to LinkedIn. It truly baffles me that so many job applications request a link to a LinkedIn profile, and sometimes the link is a required field. There are any number of valid reasons (besides the low quality content) people don’t have a LinkedIn account, and requiring someone to have a social media presence when they value their privacy is 1) bad 2) creating complicit partners in the gradual enshittification of the internet.
I run this website through Namecheap and they more or less take care of all of the backend hosting for me. It isn’t turnkey like WPengine or SquareSpace, but it’s not a heavy lift to set up your own website, nor is it particularly expensive. I have seen enough of social media to know what happens to it in the long run: even LinkedIn succumbed to the short-form video trend.
So if you don’t have a domain of your own, you should try it, because you have a story that deserves to be told outside of the confines of any one social media platform that purports to offer a “free” product.
If you want to produce your own content free of arbitrary governing policies, have control over your own destiny, not have to send a picture of your ID to an organization that doesn’t make it clear what they are going to do with it, and don’t want to look at ads, you should take the time and very marginal amount of work to make that happen.
We do actually have the ability to say “no” to these social media companies and make the web more authentic and democratic. If you are looking to start, I recommend checking out the very fine folks over at Reclaim Hosting (as in, literally, “reclaim your digital identity”) or Namecheap if you have a bit more experience.