The groupthink codex
LinkedIn is the repository of bland, inoffensive views.
The debate over free speech and cancel culture is a heated one. People on the cultural right claim that you can’t say anything these days without a woke mob coming for you, while many on the left contend that people can and frequently do say very right-wing things with no consequence.
The truth can often be found in unexpected places. On the question of free speech, the answer lies in the dullest social media platform: LinkedIn.
That’s because of LinkedIn’s origins as a professional social network. While it has capitalised on the collapse of Twitter to attract more political discussion, it is still primarily a place where people wear their corporate mask and are acutely aware that their boss (or potential future boss) might be reading what they post.
This is a much more useful measure of real-world restrictions on speech than what people in the public eye might say. Politicians and established provocateurs can survive or even benefit from controversial speech – but this requires them already to have some degree of notoriety, not to mention a thick skin.
For ordinary people the risks are far more acute. If you lose your job for saying something heterodox and you don’t already have a public following, you don’t become a martyr; you become unemployed. Even a shallower fall from favour can harm someone’s professional standing or prospects for promotion, while bringing them no benefit whatsoever.
The corporate world, for which LinkedIn is a cipher, is itself incentivised to find the least offensive political positioning in order to avoid boycotts and maximise its profit. For most of the post-war period this meant simply not engaging with politics at all, save for expressing bland corporate ‘values’ fully aligned with the prevailing ideology of the day .[1]
It is the nature of corporations to bend with the ideological winds. A few years ago when rainbow politics was in vogue, a large German carmaker put a Pride flag behind its logo on Twitter. Within minutes someone had found the page of its Middle East division – a huge market for this particular company – where the Pride flag was conspicuously absent. The corporate ‘values’ shifted to reflect the orthodoxy of different markets.[2]
Pravda
HR departments, as the adage goes, aren’t there to protect employees; they exist to protect the company from its employees. If somebody gets fired or otherwise disciplined for a speech offence, whether in the office or on LinkedIn, that’s because a corporate commissar has determined that it poses a reputational risk among employees, customers, activists, regulators or some combination of the above.
In other words, speech that can get you fired is speech that crosses the invisible line of what’s acceptable in the cultural mainstream. What people say at work, and by extension what they post on LinkedIn, is thereby the best practical indicator of where the soft boundaries of free speech lie.
There is one important difference between the corporate sphere and society at large, and that’s positivity. Corporate communication, and by extension a successful LinkedIn persona, is relentlessly, sickeningly positive. I know people whose jobs or bosses were so toxic it made them ill, but upon eventually leaving they still made sure to post a gushing AI-drafted note on LinkedIn.
In this kabuki theatre where everyone is forever thrilled and honoured, expressions of negativity are rare. Unfashionable causes won’t be attacked directly, but simply left off the carousel of bonhomie.
Similarly, when fashions change, nobody will be so crass as to point it out. Not too long ago about half of my LinkedIn connections had pronouns appended to their names. Now that such signalling has fallen from grace almost everybody has quietly binned them, like so many monogrammed shirts.
Shouts and whispers
Codifying the corporate orthodoxy – and by extension the accepted views of polite society – is not therefore straightforward; it requires some degree of reading between the lines. One way to do this is to look at the difference between what people say in private and what they post on LinkedIn.
When I began freelancing last year I considered offering event moderation alongside my writing and editing services – a fairly conventional path for a journalist. I had lunch with a friend who is a successful moderator to ask her advice. I remember her response verbatim: “I think you’d be quite good at it but I’m afraid you’re the wrong gender.”
Event organisers, she explained, were under immense pressure to gender-balance their events and, with more senior men than women generally available as speakers, they would often try to hire a female moderator to thumb the scales. My friend had heard this from so many organisers, explicitly or implicitly, that she thought it worth warning me off.
The bias is far from absolute: There are established male moderators in Brussels who get a lot of work, and others who succeed as narrow subject experts. I could probably have made a go of it. But as a generalist trying to break in, my friend felt that the odds would be stacked against me and I should direct my energies elsewhere.
I am fortunate to have a friend in that position of knowledge. Men without that privilege would benefit from a public discussion of these dynamics on LinkedIn or in other professional fora[3] so they could make similarly informed decisions. But I have never seen it mentioned there. By contrast, gender imbalances in men’s favour are frequently pointed out to rapturous applause.
Evidence is beginning to emerge that men, particularly those in their 20s, face certain structural disadvantages in their professional lives. In the UK, young women now out-earn men and more young men have dropped out of the workforce. If this is written about at all, it tends to be in very cautious language and preceded by lots of graphs and caveats.
This does not contradict the fact that men still earn more overall and that women face other forms of discrimination, and yet invoking men’s issues is too often seen as a denial of women’s, and therefore unsafe speech. International Women’s Day earlier this month prompted a flurry of corporate communication; International Men’s Day in November will be met with a few mental health cliches at best, or an eye-roll at worst.
Two opposing ideas can both be true, and two halves of a population can each have their difficulties. And yet one is expressed loudly and repeatedly in corporate townhalls and on LinkedIn, while the other is said only among friends.
[1] The US culture wars briefly changed this rationale as employees pressured companies to take stands on causes including Black Lives Matter. But after several cases of high-profile backlash, most notably the Bud Light boycott, restored the cosmic balance.
[2] A few hours later, another Twitter wag drove the point home by digging up the company’s logo from the 1930s, which featured a prominent swastika.
[3] Women-only clubs and networking groups exist precisely to help women navigate their own structural challenges; men have no formal equivalent.