LinkedIn has been suffering a growing tide of misinformation, blocking over 58mn accounts recently. This is up from 22mn.
Systems are in place to prevent profile cloning and spam accounts, however, artificial intelligence (AI) has made it harder to identify them. It was reported that over 1,000 active accounts were using faces created by AI.
Shalinda Adikari and Kaushik Dutta from Cornell University wrote a paper that said, “Fake profiles have an adverse effect on the trustworthiness of the network as a whole, and can represent significant costs in time and effort in building a connection based on fake information.”
Research has shown that targeting recently created profiles without an avatar, narrow engagement, and limited biographical information could weed out fakes with a high accuracy.
LinkedIn does not currently apply this. Constantly ranking towards the top for phishing attempts, over half companies just situated in the US alone have been reporting targets by scammers on the site.
There have been reports by LinkedIn saying it was strengthening systems to keep “inauthentic profiles and activity” off the platform. This included making it public when accounts were created, and adding phone and email verifications.
A LinkedIn spokesperson has said, “We use technology and teams of experts to help keep our community safe and trustworthy. 99 per cent percent of detected spam and scams were removed by our automated defenses and 99.6 per cent of detected fake accounts were blocked before members reported them. When we receive reports of fake accounts we quickly take action, as we did in this case.”
