Strong moderation is one of the most fundamental aspects of a functioning social media platform. It keeps the conversation civil and protects the community from potential harm. The past summer saw Twitter and Facebook updating their Community Guidelines quite frequently, and now it’s LinkedIn’s turn.
Last week, LinkedIn announced an overhaul of their Professional Community Policies. The Community Policies are a set of regulations that enable the platform to foster productive interactions. They are organized according to four principles:
- Be safe. We require everyone to be civil and respectful in every single interaction. Especially in our world today, hate, discrimination, racism, harassment, including unwanted romantic advances, or bullying have no place on LinkedIn.
- Be trustworthy. We require members to use their true identity, provide accurate information about themselves or their organization, and only share information that is real and authentic. We do not allow fake profiles, fake jobs, or misinformation.
- Be professional. We require content to be professionally relevant and on topic, such as sharing and gaining expertise, hiring or how to get hired, or learning or teaching a new skill. Explicit, shocking or inflammatory content is not allowed.
- Respect others’ rights and follow the law by adhering to privacy, copyright, and other applicable laws when you’re using LinkedIn.
In addition, the platform released a couple of new features designed to increase user trust and safety. The first one is a warning label that will pop up if LinkedIn’s AI detects potential harassment in your messages. This prompt will allow you to report the user immediately for the platform to take appropriate action. The second one, aiming at increasing transparency, is a new notification system that will let users know the details of content they reported or have content they shared removed.
Do you want to know what constitute unlawful behaviour? Check out the Community Policies here.
To learn more about the changes, check here.