After two Black Salesforce staff pointed to workplace issues in resignation letters, Salesforce's LinkedIn account posted a now-deleted message supporting BLM
Jordan Novet / CNBC : Tweets: @jordannovet and @caseynewton Tweets: Jordan Novet / @jordannovet : little update to our post on the hijacking of Salesforce's LinkedIn account last Friday. in addition to the post about BLM, there was a separate post supporting trans people. that, too, has been deleted https://www.cnbc.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : It took 19 years but there was finally a good LinkedIn post https://www.cnbc.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The deleted posts land a year into an awkward arc for LinkedIn itself: in mid-2020 the company was forced into damage control when anonymous staffers echoed BLM skeptics at an internal town hall, prompting a CEO apology and a follow-up package of racial inequality commitments. Now the parent company's own LinkedIn account has become the story — CNBC frames it as a hijacking, with both a pro-BLM post and a separate pro-trans post pulled down.
The trigger is internal, not external: two Black Salesforce employees resigned with letters citing workplace issues, putting Benioff's solidarity branding in direct conflict with his own former staff's testimony. It is also an early data point in a pattern that keeps recurring — by early 2022, 400-plus Salesforce employees would sign an open letter objecting to its NFT plans, showing public letters as the standard dissent channel inside the company.
First-order effects
- Salesforce and LinkedIn are managing a simultaneous reputational problem: the account's unauthorized posts made corporate solidarity look performative, and the deletion of both messages reads as a walk-back rather than a stance.
- The two departing Black employees' letters are now public record, shifting the burden from Salesforce's external messaging to its internal retention record under Benioff.
Second-order effects
- The episode reopens scrutiny of LinkedIn's own 2020 commitments, which followed a CEO apology after staffers echoed BLM skeptics at an internal town hall — the same platform now hosting its parent's misfire.
- Rival enterprise software employers face the same exposure: publicized resignation letters give departing employees leverage to force responses that HR processes never did.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate social-media accounts become contested terrain where employee dissent surfaces as much as employer branding — pushing companies toward tighter account controls while deepening skepticism about activist messaging unbacked by internal conditions.
- For diversity commitments across big tech, the test shifts from published pledges to whether named departures like these force auditable changes; LinkedIn's later complaints from Black users about algorithmic bias suggest the gap between pledge and product persists.
The trend: Tech employees are increasingly using public resignation letters and open letters to hold companies' external social stances accountable against their internal practices.