How to clean up littering in your feed

You may have noticed already that LinkedIn, too, is littered with fake or appropriated content. One of the consequences, of course, is the lack of credibility of the platform and the users' trust erosion in the veracity of the content it contains.

WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? Oh, the theories abound! Mine is that some users are just so eager to increase their visibility that they will race to the bottom, if necessary, to achieve that goal. They make up content and/or post someone else's as their own. A few users bury a hashtag at the end of the posted content to indicate the content was copied. Even less users give credit to the original author of the content. Hardly any place the relevant hashtag or author credit at the top of the posted content.

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT IF CONTENT TRULY IS FAKE OR APPROPRIATED? It's not always possible to know but you can increase your chances of finding out. 

1. Go to the search bar and type a long enough string of terms to increase the likelihood that the results will match what you entered. To get the results in the picture posted with this article, I typed: "I interviewed a candidate through Skype last week."
2. To refine the results, choose the appropriate type of result you want to see. For this example, I selected the category Content. As you can see, many people posted the exact same content. Verbatim.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO CURB THE NUMBER OF FAKE OR APPROPRIATED CONTENT IN YOUR FEED? Bad news first. A person determined to post fake or appropriated content will find a way. Now the good news: since it seems impossible for LinkedIn to address 100% of this content, you can very easily help them. Here are some suggestions, starting with the most effective:

1. Do not interact with the content at all. Since what appears in your feed is largely related to how you interact with content posted, you decrease the chances of that content appearing for you by not interacting with it. Additionally, less interaction leads to less visibility, which leads to less encouragement to post fake or appropriated content.
2. Mute or block the poster. In more egregious cases, I remove the connection.
3. Report the content as containing misleading content. This is suggestion #3 instead of #1 because LinkedIn's standards are not applied consistently. In one reply their Trust & Safety team told me they thoroughly reviewed the content I reported and found it did not go against LinkedIn's professional community policies. In others the team told me their thorough review led them to the decision of removing the content.
4. Comment on the content alerting others to the misleading nature of the post. The downside is that interacting with it will lead to more visibility, which leads not only to further encouraging the behavior but also to increasing the type of content in your feed.
5. Comment on the content calling out the poster. But if they cared, they would not have posted fake or appropriated content. Additionally, the downsides listed in #4 also applies with this option.

In the end, it is up to each of us to use the platform responsibly. But you can do something about it when a fellow user does not to do your part in improving the reliability of the content.

Happy posting!