According to CNN Business, bot accounts have been a top concern for many tracking the social media industry in recent months as Elon Musk tries to capitalize on the prevalence of fake and spam accounts to get out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. But bot accounts aren’t just a challenge to Twitter. LinkedIn, often considered a more benign social platform, has not been immune to inauthentic behavior that experts say is hard to detect and often perpetrated by sophisticated and well-adjusted bad actors.
In the past year, the site has faced criticism over artificial intelligence-generated profile photos that have been used to market or push cryptocurrencies and other fake profiles that list large companies as their employers or apply for high-profile positions.
Now, LinkedIn told CNN Business that the company is rolling out new features to help users assess the authenticity of other accounts before engaging with them in an effort to promote trust on the platform, which is often key to job searching and making professional connections.
Oscar Rodriguez, vice president of product management at LinkedIn, said in an interview that “while we are constantly investing in our defenses” against inauthenticity, “from my perspective, the best defense is to empower our members to decide how they want to how they want to participate.”
LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, said it has used automated defenses to remove 96 percent of fake accounts. In the second half of 2021, the company removed 11.9 million fake accounts at registration and another 4.4 million before they were reported by other users, according to its latest transparency report. (LinkedIn does not disclose estimates of the total number of fake accounts on its platform.)
However, as of this week, LinkedIn is rolling out the opportunity for some users to verify their profiles using a work email address or phone number. This verification will be incorporated into a new “About this profile” section that will also display when a profile was created and last updated to provide users with additional context about the account they may be considering contacting. If an account was created recently and has other potential red flags, such as an unusual work history, this could be an indication that users should exercise caution when interacting with it.
According to the company, this verification option will be available to a limited number of companies at first, but will become more widespread over time. The “About This Profile” section will be rolled out globally in the coming weeks.
Linkedin’s new “About This Profile” feature will show users when an account was created, when it was last updated, and whether it has been verified using a work email or phone number.
The platform will also start alerting users if they receive messages that look suspicious – such as those inviting recipients to continue a conversation on another platform, including WhatsApp (a common move in cryptocurrency-related scams) or those asking for personal information.
“None of these signals in and of themselves constitute suspicious activity …… There have been a number of perfectly good and well-intentioned accounts that have joined LinkedIn in the past week,” Rodriguez said. “The general idea here is that if a member sees a sign or two or three, I want them to get into a mindset and think for a moment, ‘Hey, am I seeing something suspicious here?”
This approach is somewhat unique among social media platforms. Most platforms, including LinkedIn, allow users to file reports if they suspect inauthentic behavior but don’t necessarily provide clues about how to detect it. Many services also offer verification options only for celebrities and other public figures.
LinkedIn said it has also improved its technology to detect and delete accounts that use AI-generated profile photos.
The technology used to create AI-generated dummy images has advanced significantly in recent years, but there are still some indications that a person’s image may have been created by a computer. For example, the person may be wearing only one earring or have oddly combed hair. the company’s machine learning models also look at smaller, harder-to-perceive signals, sometimes at the pixel level, such as how light is dispersed throughout the image, to detect such images, Rodriguez said.
Even third-party experts say that detecting and removing bots and fake accounts can be a difficult and highly subjective task. Bad actors may use a mix of computers and human management to run an account, making it harder to tell if it is automated; computer systems can create many fake accounts quickly and repeatedly; a person may simply be using an otherwise genuine account to perpetuate a scam; and artificial intelligence used to detect inauthentic accounts is not always a perfect tool.
With that in mind, LinkedIn’s update aims to provide users with more information as they navigate the platform, Rodriguez said, adding that while LinkedIn started with profile and messaging features, it plans to extend the same kind of contextual information to other key decision points for users.
This journey to authenticity is really much bigger than the issues around fake accounts or bots,” Rodriguez said. Fundamentally, we live in a world where the concept of what is a fake account or a real account, what is a good investment opportunity or job opportunity, is a fuzzy decision.”
The job search process always involves some leap of faith. However, with its latest update, LinkedIn hopes to remove a bit of the unnecessary uncertainty of knowing which accounts to trust.
