Something is seriously wrong with LinkedIn’s Trust & Safety Team.
Today, I received an email from LinkedIn’s Trust and Safety Team, informing me that one of my comments does not comply with their Professional Community Policies. I thought this must be triggered by an errant algorithm. So I immediately appealed the algorithm’s decision, hoping that a human moderator would correct the error.
Guess what? The presumably human moderator upheld the algorithm’s decision to deem my comment as ‘hate speech’.
I showed my friend the actual comment and this was what she said,
That is shocking! And quite worrying given as it would be obvious to any reasonable person that you were actually addressing and condemning hate speech yourself and pointing out the need not to fall for misleading information. I just find it all baffling given you are clearly a thoughtful and restrained commentator.
Something seriously wrong with LinkedIn’s Trust and Safety Team
In the context of Elon Musk’s infamous salute, I have seen on LinkedIn other people’s complaints about their content moderation decisions that were completely off the mark. Their efforts at trying to combat misinformation and hate speech were struck off by LinkedIn as ‘hate speech’.
Now, I am also one of these people who were falsely accused of ‘hate speech’.
I have seen other people complaining on LinkedIn that reported abusive speech was deemed as conforming to their ‘professional standards’.
I have serious doubts about the educational levels, competence or intent of LinkedIn’s content moderators. It is not that they got decisions a little wrong when dealing with tricky and ambiguous grey areas. They got their decisions spectacularly wrong.
If you are an influencer
If you have a valuable network and following on LinkedIn, you need to make a sustained effort to build your email list. You simply cannot rely on Big Tech social media platforms to house your online network. You need to own your email list and your website.
As I wrote on my website at Stratigus,
I am not trying to scare you, but these kinds of capricious acts by your social media lords happen from time to time. Your social media lords can make your business disappear in a second. Literally. Just ask the business owners above. Those poor small business owners often have no recourse. They have to start from scratch again.
As my friend confided to me,
I have a connection who has been suspended a number of times now simply for expressing views about certain events. He said it was scary as Linked In just shuts down and won’t even engage.
As LinkedIn warned me, repeated hate speech offences can result in account suspension. I already have a strike once caused by a false accusation of ‘hate speech’. I am getting nervous.
P.S. This is the comment from my friend on LinkedIn:
I have had similar experiences myself and have wondered how the LinkedIn rules are applied so I found a few openly hate speech comments by certain people. made a screen shot and reported them for hate speech – what they had written was clearly hateful and far more so than what I was banned for.
Expecting a uniform standard for defining hate speech I was rather taken aback at the response from LinkedIn who said that those comments were not against their rules.
Imagine how confused I am now, what is regarded as hate speech and how it is determined, is it connected to your ethnicity, location, or some other arbitrary factor that is hidden from the users of the platform.
I have asked a LinkedIn developer this question and his answer was that the process is hidden even from them.
I do not have a problem following rules, but I do have a problem when the rules are applied randomly and with a clear bias that is somewhat vindictive.
One does need to be careful as LinkedIn has been a part of my life as I joined long before the current owners and have a reasonably good contact list that is valuable, but I believe that we have a legitimate grievance when there is an unfair bias by the LinkedIn reviewers.