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.”