In December 2023, Coimisiún na Meán designated LinkedIn Ireland Unlimited Company (LinkedIn Ireland) – the provider of LinkedIn’s services in the European Union (EU) – as a video-sharing platform service. Consequently, LinkedIn Ireland is required to comply with the Online Safety Code (the Code).
This article explains what LinkedIn is, how we address harmful or abusive content, how you can report such content, and how to make a complaint to LinkedIn Ireland regarding our implementation of certain measures in the Code.
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Its mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. LinkedIn is a networking tool that enables members to establish their professional identities online, connect with other professionals, and build relationships for the purpose of collaborating, learning, and staying informed about industry information and trends. As such, the design and function of the platform are central to its overall risk profile, which they shape in a few key ways:
- LinkedIn is a real-identity platform, where members must use their real or preferred professional names, and the content they post is visible, for example, to their colleagues, employers, potential future employers, and business partners. Given this audience, members by and large tend to limit their activity to professional areas of interest and expect the content they see to be professional in nature.
- LinkedIn operates under standards of professionalism, which are reflected both in content policies and enforcement, as well as in content prioritisation and amplification. LinkedIn’s policies bolster a safe, trusted, and professional platform, and LinkedIn strictly enforces them. LinkedIn strives to broadly distribute high-quality content that advances professional conversations on the platform.
- LinkedIn’s Digital Safety function ensures a “safety by design” approach throughout the product development lifecycle by partnering with the relevant product and engineering organisations to conduct continuous assessments of risks and address threats prior to product launch.
As a real-identity online networking service for professionals to connect and interact with other professionals, LinkedIn has a unique risk profile when compared with many social media platforms. LinkedIn continues to invest in numerous Trust domains to proactively enhance the safety, security, privacy, and quality of the LinkedIn user experience.
How our systems work to keep members safe
On joining LinkedIn, members agree to abide by LinkedIn’s User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Members posting jobs must also comply with the Jobs Policies, and those posting ads must also comply with the Advertising Policies.
When LinkedIn finds content that doesn’t comply with these policies, we take protective measures to remove this content from our platform.
LinkedIn uses a three-layer, multidimensional approach to moderate content within our Trust ecosystem.
First layer of protection – Automatic and proactive prevention
When a member attempts to create a piece of content on LinkedIn, various calls (or signals) are sent to LinkedIn’s machine learning services. These services aim to automatically filter out certain policy violating content within milliseconds of creation, meaning the content is visible only to the author and is not shown to anyone else on the platform. As part of this process, Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a key role in helping LinkedIn proactively filter out potentially harmful content. LinkedIn uses content (like certain key words or images) that has previously been identified as violating its Professional Community Policies to help inform AI models and better identify and restrict similar content from being posted in the future.
LinkedIn measures its preventive defense services regularly to improve accuracy in the filtering process. This is done by sending some positive samples for human review to measure the precision of LinkedIn’s automated defense system. This reduces the likelihood that LinkedIn’s auto-filtering process removes content that complies with LinkedIn’s policies.
Second layer of protection – Combination of automatic and human-led detection
LinkedIn’s second layer of moderation detects content that’s likely to be violative but for which the algorithm is not sufficiently confident to warrant automatic removal. This content is flagged by our AI systems for further human review. The moderation management system automatically creates review items completely and accurately in the appropriate queues upon receipt of moderation requests from upstream systems. If the human review team determines that the content violates LinkedIn’s policies, it is removed from the platform. LinkedIn’s human review team is instrumental in this process and in helping train the platform’s models (as LinkedIn’s internally developed classifiers are trained on a set of confirmed policy-violating content, as reviewed by human moderators).
Third layer of protection – Human-led detection
The third layer of LinkedIn’s content moderation approach is human-led detection. If members identify content they believe violates the Professional Community Policies, LinkedIn encourages them to report it using the in-product reporting mechanism represented by the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the content itself or on the “More” button on the Profile headline. Reported content is then generally enqueued for human review by LinkedIn’s Trust Review Operations team or by LinkedIn’s automated system and is removed or restricted if found to be in violation of LinkedIn’s policies.
How to report content
If you identify content you believe to be illegal or violates our policies, LinkedIn encourages you to report it using the in-product reporting mechanism represented by the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the content itself on LinkedIn or on the “More” button on the Profile headline.
For more detail, see our help center article on how to report content or read about how we enforce our Professional Community Policies.
Concerns about LinkedIn’s implementation of the Code
If you are in the EU and you have concerns about how LinkedIn is implementing certain measures required by the Code, you can submit a complaint to LinkedIn Ireland.
This specific complaints process covers LinkedIn's approach to the measures relating to:
- age assurance;
- content rating;
- parental controls; and
- User reporting mechanisms and how we explain the actions taken on those reports.
For more details on how to submit these types of complaints, click here.
Note: This process does not apply to appeals or complaints regarding individual content moderation decisions (such as if your post was removed or your account was restricted). If you wish to appeal such decisions, you can do so by following the instructions in the decision notice you receive.
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