Dusseldorf The more harmless cases start like this: “Sorry, not at all for business … but you are beautiful,” says the message to a recruiter who would like to remain anonymous. Another user receives this here: “Your brain has probably already been amputated … I will discredit your shit company everywhere”. Again from somewhere else comes: “Hey honey, don’t you like to network with me?” These short sentences are all private messages – sent via LinkedIn.
The professional network in German-speaking countries has 17 million members, and around one million new users are added every six months. In times of the pandemic, the platform, which has belonged to Microsoft since 2016, has become a substitute coffee maker for many business professionals.
Sometimes it’s about the latest corona measures in the workplace. A new job can also be searched for and found on LinkedIn. Or motivate the team to start the week with a posting. Something like that, most people know and use LinkedIn.
But the career network also has its downsides: Pick-up lines, hatred and insults are now part of everyday life on the platform – and are increasing in the pandemic. If you had previously suspected kissing smileys, nicknames or evening invitations in a hotel suite on dating portals like Tinder, LinkedIn is also increasingly becoming a platform for misguided attempts at meeting people.
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Several members of the network also report hate speech to the Handelsblatt. Not all of them wanted to appear in real names in this text.
“I’ll just say hello and see what happens”
One who speaks publicly is Sarah Stein. She heads the search engine optimization department at Südwestrundfunk. Stein recently received this message from a user via LinkedIn: “Moin Sarah, I normally don’t do that with adding without comments, but you really have an extraordinary charisma here. (…) I thought I’d just say hello and see what happens. ”
Stein then publishes the message on the platform and makes it clear: “It pisses us women off.” Within a few days, over 3,000 users respond and almost 500 comment. Young professionals in particular thank her. “They often received something like this and couldn’t assess whether it was part of the business,” Stein explains. “Now they know that you don’t have to accept that and that you can defend yourself against it.”
The hashtag #linkedinisnotadatingplattform, with which the recruiter Celine Melo Cristino recently started a debate on the network, goes in a similar direction. Over the past few months, the 27-year-old has repeatedly received messages praising her “great figure” or her “stunning smile”. Cristino also found edited photos of her with a bouquet of roses in her virtual inbox on LinkedIn.
To draw a line, she put the hashtag in her profile description. Other users showed solidarity and since then have also been using the buzzword to draw attention to sexual harassment on LinkedIn. “I don’t want to receive pick-up lines,” explains Cristino. So far, her plan seems to be working. The personal complaints have become less since she started using the hashtag.
As a career and debate platform, LinkedIn is highly regarded in this country. Germany’s business elite praised the upscale discussion culture on the platform. “I am very grateful for my LinkedIn community and the often valuable input that I get in the comments,” explains star investor Frank Thelen to the Handelsblatt. CEOs like Oliver Bäte or Tim Höttges also regularly post semi-private, semi-business content in order to keep the conversation going digitally.
157,000 nuisance posts deleted in six months
The interaction on LinkedIn has never been higher than in the past few months. However, the platform has recently noticed more content that violates official guidelines and usage agreements, as the company’s own transparency report shows. According to this, around 17,000 posts due to harassment and 2588 posts with degrading content were removed worldwide in the first six months of 2020.
In the second half of the year, there were more than nine times as many cases of harassment (157,108) and five times as many hatspeech postings (13,815). The number of incorrect information also skyrocketed: from just under 23,000 in the first half of 2020 to over 110,000 posts in the second half. LinkedIn will publish the figures for the current year in January.
“We have dedicated regional teams – including German-speaking ones – and strong technical measures to identify content that violates our terms of use and our community guidelines,” explains the LinkedIn Germany press office. It is important to the company that conversations on the platform always “remain constructive and respectful and are never harmful”. Most users would “usually share their opinion, their experiences and their ideas (…) in a very constructive way”.
For social entrepreneur and activist Shai Hoffmann, the fact that so many debates in the social network are drifting away is also related to the pandemic. A few weeks ago, the influencer called for a vaccination against the coronavirus in a LinkedIn post in view of the rising incidence. “This caused a wave of indignation and hatred against me,” says the former actor with Israeli roots. “From Holocaust comparisons to the worst things that you could wish for on my neck, everything was there.”
“The tone has definitely gotten rougher,” confirms entrepreneur Tijen Onaran, one of the most important voices on the platform on the topic of diversity with more than 80,000 followers. When it comes to cross-border messages, the 36-year-old stands out: men tend to be showered with hatred of themselves, women more with sexualized comments.
And: Since the pandemic, there has been more political discussion. Topics such as Corona, but also diversity, polarized the user base much more than the latest trends in the world of work. This means that Onaran has also experienced more insults and hatred on the platform lately. In order to “stay mentally fit”, she regularly blocks people who exceed this personal limit, says Onaran.
Questionable content can stay longer on career networks
But that is sometimes easier said than done: LinkedIn offers the possibility to report messages or posts. However, users criticize the fact that the checking algorithm does not always correctly recognize offensive or harassing content. In addition, it often takes a long time before the relevant posts are actually deleted. Which may also be due to the fact that LinkedIn does not fall within the scope of the so-called Network Enforcement Act.
This obliges providers of large social networks to “delete or block obviously criminal content within 24 hours of receiving the complaint”. However, professional networks are excluded from this, as, according to the law, only “specific topics” are disseminated and not just any content, such as on Facebook or Twitter. Reported content on career networks can thus stay online longer than on other social media channels. LinkedIn assures, however: “If we see content or behavior that violates our guidelines, we take quick action to remove it.”
In Germany, alongside LinkedIn, there is also Xing as another large career network. Although both platforms have similar target groups, hate speech and sexual harassment rarely take place on Xing. At least none of the people affected reported similar hostility on the competing platform. Self-help organizations also measure significantly fewer cases of hate messages and sexism on Xing compared to LinkedIn.
“At the moment, there is still little non-job content discussed on Xing,” explains Josephine Ballon, head of the legal department at Hate Aid, a non-profit organization that advises and supports victims of online hatred. “On LinkedIn, on the other hand, more and more socio-political issues are being discussed, you are more active on the platform and looking for an exchange.”
Normally, as a lawyer, Ballon would always advise not to disclose too much personal information. But that is exactly what is difficult on career networks. After all, one of the attractions of the platforms is to show who you are and what you have achieved professionally.
Leonhardt Träumer himself has made the experience that there is no point in simply reporting posts and then waiting. “The content remains in public for far too long because the processes behind it are too slow – regardless of the network,” he explains. In 2019 he therefore founded the organization “Hassmelden”. He and his team members check cross-border messages for criminal relevance on a daily basis and submit criminal complaints to the authorities on their behalf.
In November 2021 alone, a total of 40,000 reported contributions were received by Träumer’s team. 1,600 of them came from LinkedIn, 89 from Xing. Around half are reported to the responsible police station on average. In how many cases there is a conviction has not been proven. The reported contributions from LinkedIn still only made up a small part of his work, explains Träumer. “But when you consider that a year ago we didn’t get a single report from LinkedIn, that’s an enormous increase.”
Influencer Hoffmann has not yet reported any of the insults received. Instead, he reported posts “that got grossly personal”. The blocking worked well for him. He also received “enormous approval and support from his community,” he says. And who doesn’t have a large network behind them? LinkedIn encourages you to report members, content or behavior. “We take reports from our members very seriously and check each case individually,” promises the group.
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