Leaving LinkedIn Felt Wrong. Staying Would Be Worse.
Defend your rights even when you feel like you have a lot to lose.
I didn’t plan to leave LinkedIn, but after what happened, I couldn’t stay.
After moving countries, I lost access to my old phone number linked to my LinkedIn account. When I needed to change my password, I couldn't verify without that number, creating a loop: I couldn’t log in without the number, and I couldn’t update it without logging in. I had already verified my email, the primary contact and identity proof for my account. This should have sufficed. Unlike other platforms that use authenticator apps, passkeys, or backup codes for identity verification, LinkedIn’s only solution when I reached a dead end was to submit a government-issued ID, with no alternatives.
I said no.
That’s the line I wasn’t willing to cross. You shouldn’t have to cross it either.
I’ve been thinking about what that refusal means ever since. Handing over a government-issued ID to log in to a professional network may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t. We are living through a moment when basic human rights are being challenged on every front, and too often our response is to accommodate, accept the new terms, and tell ourselves it’s not worth the fight. At some point, you ask yourself: when is enough enough? For me, this was that moment.
This isn’t as unusual as it might sound. Anyone who has moved countries, switched carriers, or simply lost access to an old number can end up in the same loop. You haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve just moved on with your life, and the platform hasn’t made room for that. If you are reading this and you have already submitted your ID in this situation, I understand. A decade’s worth of connections, conversations, and professional history is not nothing, but you should never have been put in that position. None of us should.
Leaving comes with a cost, and I want to be clear about that. My LinkedIn profile includes connections I have cultivated over decades across different jobs, cities, and career phases. I also have former colleagues, mentors, admired thought leaders, and people I have worked with and continue to stay in touch with. More recently, the profile began to grow after I launched my podcast, Progress Reimagined, attracting new listeners and connections, people I was only beginning to know. The account feels almost irreplaceable because it reflects different stages of my career through various versions of myself. However, I realize this isn’t merely about my ID. What I am being asked to give up is my privacy and personal boundaries, which I value more than any potential loss.
It’s worth being precise here because the full picture is more troubling than it first appears. For most users, LinkedIn’s government ID verification is still opt-in, a voluntary step to get a verified badge on your profile. LinkedIn has been rolling this out across dozens of countries, framing it as a trust feature. It sounds reasonable in principle. But account recovery is a different story. Once you’re locked out and can’t verify through other means, ID submission is no longer optional. It is the only way out of a broken loop on their platform. That’s not a trust feature. That’s a trap door. And it’s one that will catch anyone off guard, especially those who have ever changed countries, lost a phone, or simply moved on, which is to say, many of us.
Handing over a government-issued document to access a social network would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today, it’s framed as a security measure, a terms-of-service requirement, or a reasonable ask. We’ve been nudged so gradually that we barely notice how far we’ve been pushed. Nothing about today’s most powerful tech platforms is normal. From the scale of data collection to the leverage they hold over people’s online presence, these companies can lock you out of years of work and demand your passport as the price of re-entry. We have normalized the abnormal, one small policy update at a time. This is how rights erode. Not in one dramatic moment, but gradually, through a thousand reasonable-sounding asks.
I remember when LinkedIn felt different. It was over a decade ago. I was working as a reporter in Japan for the world’s largest financial news organization, and LinkedIn had just entered the market. It felt fresh, offering a window into your professional network, a place where your work spoke for itself. I built a following and had real conversations. The engagement felt earned. LinkedIn Learning was once genuinely useful, a real library of professional development, built with care. That version of the platform has long since disappeared.
The phenomenon that replaced it is called enshittification, a term invented by author and Electronic Frontier Foundation Special Advisor Cory Doctorow to illustrate a common pattern across social media platforms. First, a platform is useful to users. Then it grows large enough that it no longer needs to be. The feed gets quietly narrowed. Reach collapses. The platform offers to turn the tap back on, for a price. In LinkedIn’s case, that price isn’t always money. It can be your time, your consistency, and your willingness to post on schedule. You take the time to post, hoping the algorithm decides you’ve earned visibility. Your connections haven’t disappeared. The system has simply decided it gets to determine how worthy your post is, how many people should see it, and who should see it. All you wanted was to reach the network and communities you spent years building. You are left having to prove yourself worthy to an algorithm, just to speak.
That dynamic, in which visibility has to be gamed rather than earned, is part of what broke the social media environment in the first place. A recent Rest of World investigation found that virtual assistants in the Philippines are paid about $7 an hour to use AI tools to write posts and comments on behalf of Western executives. These workers coordinate in WhatsApp groups, notifying each other of new posts so they can comment and simulate organic engagement. As one of them put it: “It’s all AI comments by fake people answered with fake replies by other fake people.” This didn’t emerge from nowhere. When a platform makes authentic reach nearly impossible, people find workarounds. The fake engagement problem is, in large part, a consequence of the algorithm problem.
To be fair, LinkedIn may have legitimate reasons to verify accounts and weed out fakes in the age of AI, but there are ways to do that without demanding government ID. Passkeys, authenticator apps, and other methods can confirm identity without making your users feel exposed. The fact that LinkedIn asks for a passport scan rather than any of these options suggests where its priorities lie. In the meantime, it introduced games, actual puzzle games embedded in a professional network, to keep you on the platform longer. Gamification is designed around dopamine hits because engagement driven by genuine interest is no longer enough.
Then there were the emails. In April alone, I received more than a dozen from LinkedIn: conversation suggestions, reminders that I was missing out, and prompts that the experience is better on the app. About one every two days. I suspect other users see through this too, which might be why the emails keep coming. It’s a common tactic across declining platforms: grab attention by any means, keep the metrics high, and push engagement until it’s exhausted. What’s quietly lost in the process is user trust. For us, it’s our time with family, our focus, and our ability to truly be present in our lives.
Younger individuals appear to understand these issues more clearly. Studies consistently show that Gen Z is the most likely to consider social media detoxes and to curb their time online. As the most digitally immersed generation, they are also the most aware of social media’s costs. A recent peer-reviewed study found that overall posting declined from 2020 to 2024 for most users in the US, and polarization on platforms increased. Despite this, they haven’t abandoned these platforms. For many, social media is essential infrastructure for finding jobs, staying up to date, and maintaining relationships, though they don’t fully trust these platforms. Growing up within these systems, they learned early on what it costs.
It’s worth addressing a question that often comes up: if you haven’t done anything wrong, why does privacy matter? Privacy is a basic human right. It is not something you trade away for access, and it is definitely not something a platform gets to extract from you incrementally until one day submitting a passport to log in feels like a normal step. The right to privacy means having a space that belongs to you: mental, professional, and personal. The moment a platform holds years of your professional identity and can demand your documents to let you back in, you are no longer in control of that space. And spaces we don’t actively defend, we end up giving away. After all, we have already handed over so much of ourselves to these platforms without fully realizing it.
Sarah Wynn-Williams, in Careless People, writes about how totalitarian regimes can move the line on what’s admissible, what’s safe to post today, what will carry consequences tomorrow. Her argument was specifically about authoritarian states, but the parallel with major tech platforms makes me uneasy. Often, you don’t even know what game you’re in. Social media algorithms are rarely disclosed. You don’t know what gets suppressed, what gets amplified, or what invisible hands govern your visibility. There’s even a term for it now, shadowbanning, the practice of quietly limiting who can see your content without telling you it’s happening. The fact that this word exists at all should make anyone uncomfortable because of the power it implies a platform has over you. You are playing a game whose rules you can’t see, against an opponent who wrote them and can rewrite them at any time. You wouldn’t even know what you did wrong. When a platform changes its policies, you face a stark choice: accept it, or lose everything you’ve built there, the connections, the content, the professional network, the years of work. There is no negotiation.
X is the most recent example. The platform changed so dramatically and unilaterally that people who built real audiences there now find themselves in a space they barely recognize, with content quality in decline and an atmosphere that makes engagement feel slightly undignified. Yet many feel they can’t leave because that’s still where their audience is, and where marketing lives. The line moved. You follow it, or you go.
Yanis Varoufakis, in Technofeudalism, argues that we’ve become digital serfs, generating value on platforms we don’t own, in exchange for access we don’t control, serving platform lords who profit from everything we create. The progression is worth naming plainly. These platforms began by being useful. Then indispensable. Then extractive, taking our time, our attention, our data, our emotional energy, our money.
I’m not the only one who reached this point. Jacob Warwick built his entire career on LinkedIn, rising from minimum-wage work to earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, and wrote earlier this year about why he walked away from the platform. Someone who owed his success to the platform more than most. He describes what LinkedIn has become as a place where people dismantle careers and reputations under their own names, for the sake of performative virtue, a networking site turned surveillance state where the cost of being human is a public trial. His conclusion, after nearly two decades, was that what he really needed was depth.
That conclusion stayed with me because depth is exactly what we often crave, and what these platforms are not built to provide. They are designed for broad, shallow, algorithmically optimized reach: reach drives engagement, and engagement keeps advertisers and recruiters spending.
We are living in a time when rights are being eroded on every front. Journalists are killed for exercising their right to tell the story. Privacy is invaded even by one’s own government, as we’ve seen in the United States. Voting systems are manipulated until individual votes carry less weight. Women’s bodily autonomy is legislated away. In that context, handing your passport to a social media platform might seem like a small thing. It isn’t. Every right we surrender without a fight, however quietly, makes the next surrender easier.
So my advice is simple. Invest your energy in things you truly own: your own blog, your email list, your podcasts, your direct relationships, and smaller communities that aren’t built on extraction. A website or Linktree to tie it all together is worth having. None of these will give you explosive growth, but they will give you control, which is precisely what platforms can’t offer.
Being more intentional extends to where your attention and money go. The tools you use every day are worth rethinking, too. When I recently canceled a Calm subscription and a Webflow account, both processes were fast and straightforward. No buried menus to find the cancel button, no endless “are you sure?” loops, no confusing steps designed to make you give up before you’re done. After finishing, I felt relieved and grateful that everything went so smoothly, but I caught myself reflecting on how much we’ve adjusted our expectations. At a minimum, easy offboarding should be standard. When it feels more effortless than expected, it reflects the condition we’ve silently accepted.
This is not a call to delete your account. If LinkedIn still works for you as it once did for me, and if the professional benefits justify the costs, that’s a decision only you can make. However, many of us seem to be arriving at a similar conclusion: the trade-off no longer feels fair. The platform now requires more, more time, more posts, and ultimately, more of your privacy.
A basic human right should never be treated as a premium feature. It isn’t something you lose when joining a professional network, nor should a platform progressively demand more from you, eventually forcing you to upload your passport just to access your account.
Privacy is a human right. Hold the line and defend it.
A note: If LinkedIn wants to demonstrate that its verification process works for real people in real situations, it knows where to find me.
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