It's OK to swear

It's OK to swear - if you are LinkedIn.

Social media platforms have recently been under fire for failing to curb bullying, abuse, racism, sexism, pornography, extreme beliefs, and trolling generally. It's a difficult area to police, because too much content is generated for this to be done manually. So, the platforms rely on algorithms that identify word-strings that are common in these cases, and tag them for review, or pull the content immediately.

Clearly, the system cannot be perfect, because you will get a lot of false positives (an algorithm cannot understand broader context or tone of voice), as well as missing genuine cases, because it's difficult to keep up with slang, coded language and shifts in what is, and is not, acceptable language. I am not going to give examples, because that would probably result in this article being deleted, and my account suspended (or worse).

However, LinkedIn does not check itself. How do I know this? Well, recently, it condensed a link to a website to: https://lnkd.in/fuckPPk...I didn't notice the vulgarity until I had shared a post containing it, and it's now too late.

Oh well.

Clive Wright is Founder and CEO of The CrowdHub Group: building communities of purpose in crowdfunding and crowdsourcing.