Artificial intelligence has made it much easier to create fake accounts and fake work experiences for online manipulation and fraud. On Wednesday, LinkedIn unveiled a set of tools designed to combat this and give people and businesses more control over how they are presented on the platform.
Artificial intelligence has made it much easier to create fake accounts and fake work experiences for online manipulation and fraud. On Wednesday, LinkedIn unveiled a set of tools designed to combat this and give people and businesses more control over how they are presented on the platform.
This is reported by The Wall Street Journal.
This is especially critical for LinkedIn: unlike other social networks, professional reputation here is directly built on work experience, positions, certificates and diplomas, so the ability to verify that a person is really who they say they are has a direct impact on career opportunities. LinkedIn Vice President of Product Oscar Rodriguez noted that forging trust is cheap and easy today, and demonstrating real trust is more important than ever.
Here’s what’s changed and how to use it.
The main innovation is the ability to confirm that you actually worked with a former or current colleague or teammate at a certain time. This is not a recommendation with an assessment of the quality of cooperation, but rather a fact: "yes, we really did cross paths at work."
To use the feature, your profile needs to be verified — this is the status that gives you the right to confirm the experience of others. LinkedIn limits abuse: only a user with a verified profile, who has been in contact with them for at least a year and has an account protected by two-factor authentication, can confirm a colleague.
According to LinkedIn, its existing verification tools have already confirmed the identities of 115 million users and more than 700,000 businesses on the platform. Rodriguez noted that the company views authenticity as a key resource on the internet.
Verified profiles also receive practical benefits: according to Rodriguez, on average, they have 50% more post views and 90% more impressions compared to unverified accounts.
The second feature (previously only available to recruiters and managers) allows company page administrators to open the profile of a user who falsely claims to work at the company and manually remove the connection. Once removed, the person’s profile itself remains unchanged — this is under their control — but the clickable link to the company page disappears from their profile and their work experience is no longer marked as verified.
The feature is aimed at full-time employees, not contractors or field workers — LinkedIn provides other ways for them to confirm their connection to their employer. Separately, the company is testing a requirement to undergo workplace verification (for example, via corporate email) for any new account trying to link itself to a company page.
LinkedIn is expanding the list of partners that allow you to display your verified LinkedIn identity in other services. Truecaller and PeerSpot are joining Adobe and UserTesting — for example, Truecaller users will be able to display their verified LinkedIn identity to the other person during a call.
