LinkedIn’s Broken Automation Took Down My Company’s Page Without Warning

TokyoDev is a job board and community that helps international software developers begin and grow their careers in Japan. Given our focus, it’s not surprising that LinkedIn is the social network that delivers us the most traffic. Typically, about 4% of our total visitors arrive from LinkedIn.

The other week, I received an email from them.

Apparently TokyoDev’s LinkedIn page had violated their professional community policies so severely that they’d removed our page without warning.

I knew we hadn’t posted any content that would warrant this, but I also wasn’t completely caught off guard. A couple weeks earlier, I’d heard from another founder who’d had the same thing happen to him, with his similar job board that was focused on the Korean market.

From this point, though, there wasn’t a clear path forward. As I couldn’t find any way to appeal the restriction, I sent a general support request. A day later, I hadn’t heard back from them, so I posted about it on my personal LinkedIn page. Thanks to the help of TokyoDev’s connections and community, I was able to get my issue passed on to the “executive escalations team,” where at least I got a reply, though no immediate assistance.

A week later, I got word that my page had been restored. Though I’d asked to know why it was banned in the first place, I wasn’t given any reason beyond it being a mistake. So I sent another follow up about that, and then made this job post on our restored page.

The next day, I got a reply from LinkedIn’s executive escalations team, to the effect that our page had been taken down due to “an automation error.” Again, I was looking for something more concrete so I could avoid having it happen again, and I sent yet another request for more details.

Then I went to make another post on our LinkedIn page, only to discover we had been banned again.

The next day, I finally got some actual details about why we had been taken down.

I understand that our automations mistakenly flagged your recent job postings on your page as being in violation of our discrimination policy, which includes protections against age, gender, nationality, race, sexual orientation, and other characteristics.

That answered why (kind of), but my page was still currently banned, and the case manager made no acknowledgement of that in their reply.

A day later, my page is back up again. I’m not sure if I dare post to it though!

I figure LinkedIn’s automation took issue with the fact that our job posting had the word “Japanese” in it. Japanese is both a nationality and a language, and so perhaps they’re looking through a list of nationalities and flagging any job post that contains them.

That I made a single post which caused our page to get taken down a second time leads me to believe that their automation is incredibly naive. It may also be that each time we make a new post, they’re taking a look at all our historical posts and flagging ones like the following.

If that’s the case, it might be the “No Japanese” that’s getting us in trouble. Their system apparently thinks we’re prohibiting Japanese people from applying.

The fact that the TokyoDev page was removed for “discrimination” is quite ironic. Our posts are about helping Japanese companies attract more diverse candidates–the opposite of discrimination, in fact.

Now I’m just left wondering if I should even try to post to our company page again, as I don’t want to have to jump through hoops a third time.