Book Natalie. She'll bring the receipts.

LinkedIn shut down my account for 48 hours because too many people looked at my profile.

I went deep into cybersecurity forums on LinkedIn, and I was usually the only woman in a very long thread full of men who mostly didn't know what they were talking about. One of them was insisting "the quarantine protocol" is all everyone needs for good cybersec hygiene. I Googled it mid-argument. It isn't a thing.

I annoyed enough of them that traffic to my profile spiked. LinkedIn read that as suspicious activity and froze me for 48 hours. That was the stated reason. Too many people had looked at me.

Why it matters: the algorithm punished me for the exact outcome it's supposed to reward. That's not a story about men on the internet. That's a story about how the platform actually works.

She speaks five languages. Not one of them was on her profile.

I asked a client how many languages she spoke. Five. And I said: none of them are listed. And you don't mention A, B, or C either. I'm genuinely struggling to understand why you can't see your own brilliance.

She started laughing and said, I guess I really do need to.

Why it matters: the more accomplished someone is, the harder this gets. Most of the work isn't writing. It's getting someone to see what they already have.

Two decades of industry events. Nothing. Then a dozen connection requests before she got home.

Same industry, same rooms, same faces, two decades. She'd come home with business cards and a few polite follow-ups.

After we rebuilt her profile she flew to a workshop in Chicago. The connection requests started arriving while she was still traveling home: more than a dozen, all from that room.

Why it matters: nothing about the room changed. Same industry, same kind of event, same people. The only variable was what they found when they looked her up.

Then LinkedIn throttled me, and that's the one that changed how I teach.

I wrote a series of posts about Zara Dar, an educator who found unexpected success posting her science videos on PornHub — the exact same ones she posted on YouTube — and made 3x the money. LinkedIn removed my post, added it back, and then simply throttled my reach afterward, hard. I went from thousands and tens of thousands of impressions per post to hundreds.

Around the same time I'd been swearing in the opening lines of posts, because I have a potty mouth and it hadn't cost me anything before. It started costing me. This was exactly when LinkedIn rolled out its new AI system.

Why it matters: the 48-hour freeze was a story about the platform. This one changed the method. It's where my rule comes from that you never swear in the first 100 characters of a LinkedIn post. Not because swearing is unprofessional, but because that's the window the classifier reads hardest. She mapped the whole thing afterward →

On the blog: Why your LinkedIn reach just tanked · The 5 rules for rebuilding a trust score