LinkedIn has verified its more than 55 million users, free of charge, to combat the spread of false information fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, the company told CNBC.
I MicrosoftThe managed service is said to have the most verified identity of any social network. In November, the company will begin displaying its user authentication badges within LinkedIn’s main feed.
“Now you’re seeing things like deeply fake videos, images that are becoming harder for the naked eye to tell if they’re real or fake,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of Trust and Safety, told CNBC in an interview. “That blurring of the line is what we believe presents the biggest challenge in combating things like lying, professional deception and so on.”
LinkedIn began verifying users in April 2023. The move follows social media platform X’s decision in November 2022 to require users who want a verification badge to sign up for its paid service, and came shortly thereafter. Meta launched Meta Verified, a subscription service that allows Facebook and Instagram users to earn badges to verify their profiles.
Social networks are increasing their efforts to remove fake activities, including scams and misinformation, from all their services. The rise of artificial intelligence technology since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022 has made it easier and cheaper for people to create fake accounts and content on social media.
While peers charge users to verify, LinkedIn verifies people for free, and uses a two-pronged strategy, aiming to have 100 million verified users by 2025, the company said.
For users who work in large companies, LinkedIn communicates with them through their company email addresses. The feature currently only works for employees at select companies, but Rodriguez said LinkedIn is thinking of ways to expand the verification process.
Its alternative authentication method involves users submitting their government IDs with partners such as Clear and Persona and, for users in India, digitization service DigiLocker.
LinkedIn pays its verification partners for the service. The company did not disclose how much it is spending on the certification, but Rodriguez called it a “huge investment.”
“Being able to understand the authenticity of a person will be very important in how we see the development of the Internet in the future,” he said. “We want to make it more accessible and in doing so build a loyal community on LinkedIn.”
Only a small percentage of LinkedIn’s more than 1 billion members are verified.
LinkedIn has verified its more than 55 million users, free of charge, to combat the spread of false information fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence, the company told CNBC.
Courtesy of LinkedIn
Validation is key
Even before the rise of AI productivity, fake accounts were a problem on LinkedIn. Spoof accounts have emerged from high-profile tech executives such as Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg. LinkedIn said it takes down 99% of fake profiles before users meet them on social media.
In the past, users could identify fake accounts from real profiles by looking at job information and a photo, Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn’s vice president of consumer products, told CNBC.
“In the world of AI, where you can create images left and right, it’s not going to be that easy,” he said. “Authentication becomes another very important signal when you’re thinking about a platform that’s about professional communication and networking.”
Meta on Monday announced that it is testing the use of facial recognition technology to detect and prevent people from using celebrity likenesses to defraud users of their services.
LinkedIn said it bypasses individual users, and verifies job listings and company pages.
Sachdeva said users are motivated to use verification because they use LinkedIn to find jobs and promote their work. LinkedIn said that verified profiles tend to receive 60% more profile views, 30% more connection requests and 50% more post engagement than non-verified profiles.
LinkedIn said it takes a more conservative approach to verifying users — for example, if a user’s name doesn’t match the name on their government ID — to ensure it maintains a high bar of verified users.
“We choose to make a mistake, like not confirming someone, instead of confirming someone and realizing that it’s the wrong confirmation,” Rodriguez said.
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