My blog on censorship and being banned was censored and banned!

Yesterday I wrote a blog about the fact that my presentation to Girls in Tech at LinkedIn's offices in Singapore was censored and then banned as a result of featuring 1) female examples of what not to do on LinkedIn (as well as many male ones) and 2) female tech entrepreneur and bikini e-commerce giant Candice Galek.

I was invited by them 2 weeks, I had been promoting the event to my followers so I had no choice other than to let people know that I would not be there and why, and yes point out Girls in Tech total hypocrisy. I.e they didn't want me to promote a female tech entrepreneur just because she sells bikinis. I guess if she sold widgets that would have been fine.....

The post went viral, lots of great conversations and comments, not all agreeing with me which is absolutely fine and I deleted none. Candice herself shared it and it went viral in her network too.

Then at about 11am yesterday the likes, comments and shares stopped. Dead. I then started getting dozens and dozens of people saying that they could no longer read my blog. Even the link that Candice shared as a separate post was no longer there. It had been removed.

Clearly LinkedIn had censored and banned my blog and any one else for sharing it. Apparently LinkedIn are now acting like the Chinese government or some totalitarian regime. No explanation, no dialogue, nothing. Just gone.

A few people said that I shouldn't have named Girls in Tech but I had to as it was there event and I had a right to let people know what had happened and why I would no longer be appearing and the censorship of my blog. They had acted unprofessionally in their dealings with me in my view. Why should they not be named?

You are of course talking to someone who has been named and shamed to death in Singapore for years by trolls and the media for having a point of view and point of difference. No one has said that others can't do that to me because I apparently "put myself out there to be shot at". Fair enough, the red mohawk is very attractive to some and hated by others. I care less.

The point is that if you put on an event, invite someone, they spend time marketing that event to their followers, spend time putting a special deck together, that deck is then censored and 36 hours before the event itself say to you that you are being removed because LinkedIn want their own person there (which they clearly could have done when the event was first organised 4 weeks ago and didn't as no one at LinkedIn actually knows very much about personal branding....Whereas I have not one, but two companies that do personal branding for entrepreneurs on LinkedIn (Black Marketing) and beyond LinkedIn (The Dark Art of Marketing) and have my second book coming out about Personal Branding Mastery For Entrepreneurs on October 4th and if you search for "personal branding" on LinkedIn out of 70,000 results I come top) then that is totally unprofessional. Plus I needed a way of telling my followers who were going what had happened.

I am literally the best qualified person to do a talk about personal branding in Singapore if not Asia Pacific. Therefore my blog was justified in explaining what had happened and why in my view. It was also factual. No one doubted anything I had said.

Are LinkedIn now censoring blogs outside of China just like they are inside China? Read this article from the WSJ on the subject.

Clearly people are interested in my subject and my blog as after it was banned with no explanation I screen grabbed a picture of one of many people saying that they could no longer read it and shared on LinkedIn with the intro saying that my blog about censorship and being banned has itself been censored and banned. So far after only a few hours it has 10,000 views and people asking me to repost the original...

I might leave that to my next book: "How To Be Censored and Banned Mastery For Entrepreneurs....."

Please feel free to comment below, agree or disagree, the point is to discuss these things in a professional context not be censored and banned just because they justifiably criticise you or/and your company.