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30 Oct, 2016

LinkedIn newslines moving to Facebook, Twitter

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Update: LinkedIn Restores Newsline Pages


Short version: Due to censorship and excessively harsh treatment, we are moving our newslines off of LinkedIn. Please re-subscribe to our newslines on Twitter and Facebook.

Elon Musk Donald Trump Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban
Jeff Bezos Richard Branson Mark Cuban

It has now been almost 48 hours since I asked Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO, for help in resolving his staff’s deletion of multiple entrepreneur newslines, with 20,000 followers on his site. He has not responded nor taken any action to restore the feeds, which had been in operation for six months until the Donald Trump Newsline was targeted just as it was beginning to take off.

Firstly, I was told that the pages were not suitable as they did not “extend my company’s presence”.

This Showcase page was deactivated, not because of content, however, because a Showcase Page allows you to extend your Company Page presence by creating a dedicated child page for those aspects of your business. Interested members can then follow your Showcase Page as they follow any Company Page. This showcase page is better suited for a ‘group’.

This is completely false. Our brand is news curation. As a topic-based news aggregator, Newslines’ business is to curate news on topics. The showcase page allows us to show exactly how we do that. But then they changed their story to say that the pages were deleted because they were linking to “third-party” sites.

Showcase Pages are designed to establish a dedicated page to represent a brand, business unit, or company initiative. These showcases were of 3rd party brands.

This is also false. Showcase pages throughout LinkedIn link to third-party news articles That’s part of what makes it a “showcase”. For example, IBM’s showcase pages link to articles in online magazines like EWeek and CIOReview and others. Is LinkedIn really going to stop IBM and the thousands of other showcase pages from linking to external articles?

It seems very clear that they initially wanted to stop my Donald Trump page, and when I called them out on it they vindictively took away my other pages. All through this debacle these has been no concern expressed by LinkedIn support about the loss of six months work, and 20 thousand followers that I painstakingly selected news for each day. When I asked them to transfer the members to groups they said no. When I asked if they would reinstate the pages if I only linked to Newslines they said no. They never said at any point that they were sorry, or gave me any kind of advice, other than to say I should make a group, which is completely unsuited to either my company’s brand, and is unsuitable for use as a tightly curated news source

And it seems Mr Weiner doesn’t care. He’d rather talk about his election predictions than actually deal with a customer who has a complaint, or support someone who creates newsfeeds that can keep his users happy with their feed. So we cannot support a platform that censors its content, deletes months of hard work on vague technicalities, treats its content creators so poorly, and does not offer solutions or any real help. If you want to have quality hand-picked news, then I invite you to join our newslines on Facebook and Twitter, companies that, for all their faults, actually understand that content creators are the core of their business.

Thank you, I appreciate your support.


Mark Devlin is the founder and CEO of Newslines. Find out more about him here, and more about Newslines here. Click here to follow Mark on Twitter.

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