LinkedIn’s “Mentioned in the News” feature withdrawn following complaints

LinkedIn’s “Mentioned in the News” feature withdrawn following complaints

The social networks are constantly innovating in their concepts and features, to bring more experiences to their users. It is as well as in 2017, LinkedIn proposed the signal “Mentioned in current events ”.

This new feature had the particularity of associating LinkedIn profiles people using the site as well as LinkedIn corporate pages recorded on the network to online press publications, through an algorithm developed by the social network LinkedIn, and to notify all Internet users registered on the site.

This algorithm, whose performance relative was highlighted on the social network’s support page [1] , was innovative and attractive, but not incontestable, since buttons “Bad person” or “Bad company”, on which users could click, were already present in case identification error.

If LinkedIn had speculated that its calculations could be wrong and identify the wrong people or the wrong organizations, two complaints made the fiction a reality. Indeed, the disambiguation is engulfed in one of the flaws in the development of the algorithm, which identified several people by mistake, creating professional setbacks and embarrassing situations, the references not necessarily being exciting.

One of the complainants, for example, lost several contracts as a result of this computer mishap. It was only after he contacted LinkedIn and felt he had not received the consideration and responses that he expected that the complaint was filed.

In addition to the financially damaging mishaps that occurred for this user, other people who found themselves associated with news that did not concern them also raised the problem of data protection posed by this misdemeanor. At the time of the RPDG and the scandals related to the use of personal data of social network users, LinkedIn preferred to suspend for the moment the function “Mentioned in the news”, in order to assess and define a more efficient algorithm.

NB: we are talking about algorithm here but it is not about LinkedIn algorithm that manages the visibility of your LinkedIn posts . It is this second that must be put in his pocket to be visible to his target to sell with LinkedIn (Social Selling) .

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/51483/fonctionnalite-mentionne-dans-l-actualite?lang=fr