Apr 24, 2018 - Technology
LinkedIn CEO: There's no easy fix for fake news
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner tells Axios that "arguably the most important" way LinkedIn stays ahead of fake news and platform abuse is "manual curation and the role of editors."
- "To have qualified, highly-expert editors making decisions in terms of what's being seen and by whom, that can be very helpful,"Weiner says.
- The company also uses machine learning and "social cues and viral signals" that its membership is creating to elevate what's buzzy.
Why it matters: Weiner suggests that fake news has been created, in part, as a result of companies moving away from vetting content.
- "When companies, publishers, news outlets — when any organization that historically was focused on creating quality content — builds a business based on a business model that is, in part, driven by traffic and clicks, talk about unintended consequences."
- "You're going to see potentially a regression towards that action as opposed to the founding principles of the company, which is to deliver, hopefully, a quality experience and hopefully a factual experience and hopefully an experience that has been vetted and triangulated and isn't about being first or the most provocative or the most titillating."
- "And we are increasingly getting away from that and it's being complicated in a very material way, by the rise of technologies that facilitates the counter to virtually everything I just said."
Be smart: Other tech platforms that use editors include Snapchat, Apple News and Flipboard.
Go deeper: Weiner says LinkedIn can be seen as an economic graph that's “digitally mapping the global economy across six different pillars.”
