LinkedIn has a problem with fake commenters

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William Grace-Hunter does not exist, although this may not be immediately apparent from his LinkedIn profile. The “BlackRock senior investment adviser” is a very opinionated type of answer, albeit with only an interest and a post in his name:

“There is no investment advisor at BlackRock,” said a spokesperson for the asset manager, who added that if the person had been an actual employee commenting on an individual stock or issuer on social media it would have been a disciplinary matter.

LinkedIn has faced a growing wave of misinformation. The social media network blocked more than 58 million accounts between July and December 2022, up from 22 million in the first six months of the year, according to its most recent transparency report:

And while there are systems to be identified profile cloning AND spam accounts, artificial intelligence has made identification more difficult. A study by the Stanford Internet Observatory in 2022 identified more than 1,000 active profiles using what appear to be faces created by artificial intelligence.

“Fake profiles have a negative effect on the reliability of the network as a whole and can represent significant costs in terms of time and effort to build a connection based on false information,” write Cornell University’s Shalinda Adikari and Kaushik Dutta in a 2020 document.

Their research suggests that by targeting recently created profiles with no avatars, narrow engagement, and limited biographical information, the fakes could be weeded out with very high accuracy. It is not a strategy currently applied by LinkedIn, so importance may be given to profiles such as The lonely ones shown below:

To be clear, there may be real people with honest opinions behind each of these profiles. For anyone who feels their point of view is being ignored, all types of social media can do that they appear to provide a megaphone.

It’s LinkedIn’s status as a corporate safe space, which Microsoft has worked to uphold by following its own 2016 site purchase – which makes these low-quality posters an existential concern. The platform consistently hovers near the top for phishing attemptsaccording to cybersecurity firm Check Point Research, while NordLayer finds that more than half of US-based businesses report being targeted by scammers via the site.

LinkedIn said last year it was strengthening systems to keep “inauthentic profiles and activities” off the platform, including making public when accounts were created and if the user verified their phone number and work email.

But have he turned 20 this year, the proliferation of fake profiles is just one of LinkedIn’s problems to solve. Low-quality content and limited engagement can also show up the most verified of accounts:

LinkedIn and THG, the subject of Grace-Hunter’s only post to date, did not immediately respond to our requests for comment.

Update 5.50pm BST:

Grace-Hunter is gone. A LinkedIn spokesperson said: “We use technology and teams of experts to help keep our community safe and trustworthy. 99% percent of detected spam and scams were removed by our automated defenses and 99.6%. of fake accounts detected they were blocked before members reported them. When we receive reports of fake accounts we act quickly, as we did in this case.”