Removing Nation-State Activity from Our Platform

Today, LinkedIn’s Head of Trust & Safety, Paul Rockwell, shared a post about removing nation-state activity from our platform. We’re sharing his full post here as well:  

Our commitment to keeping LinkedIn a safe, trusted and professional community means that we regularly invest in new ways to prevent fake accounts or fraudulent activity on our platform.

In May 2018, we restricted a number of fake profiles for violating our terms of service. Recently, through the application of a set of new tools, human review and intelligence from a variety of sources, including government agencies, we have determined that these fake profiles were created by suspected nation-state actors with an intent to spread information on LinkedIn. Specifically, 24 fake profiles we suspect were created by Russian nation-state actors, that were active and engaged in the sharing of politically divisive content from both ends of the U.S. political spectrum. Almost 80 percent of the content they shared received no comments or likes from other members and the remainder saw low engagement. Since our discovery, we have taken down all the shared content from these profiles.

We continue to engage with the FBI and the U.S. Congress on this activity and are sharing our findings with industry peers. We will continue to enforce our policies, which are very clear: the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service.

We’re committed to keeping LinkedIn safe and will continue to invest in new methods to prevent, detect and mitigate fake profiles. We also encourage members to report any content they encounter that makes them uncomfortable. We take these reports seriously, and take action on content that violates our Terms of Service or Professional Community Policies.