Everybody, we have to solve LinkedIn harassment once and for all!
Recently I saw a post by Katja Diehl on the issue of sexual harassment on LinkedIn.
In detail she describes how women, who speak their mind online, experience hate speech and harassment.
Statistically, this leads to many women not speaking their mind openly anymore and stopping to post content online. The result is that we have a less diverse social media landscape. And the negative impact of low diversity is nothing to be explained to anyone.
The question is: why do platforms, not only LinkedIn, do so little to protect women on their platforms?
Considering LinkedIn has around 20.000 employees I wonder what these people do all day long. Or is it because content moderation is widely outsourced? Or because 57% of LinkedIn employees are male and just don’t value the matter enough?
Either way, I’d like to present a solution to this issue: crowdsource content moderation to a wider extent than today.
Simply speaking (and I know the system has flaws, but those could be worked out): build a system where
1) users can flag content (posts, comments) they deem hate speech or harassing
2) let other users decide if the flag is appropriate
3) if it’s appropriate, downgrade or delete the content
Yes, this opens up the possibility for bot networks or coordinated groups to manipulate certain types of content.
But this is where another concept comes into play: Klout, or any other type of social scoring system. Users get scored on various kinds of activities (I’m sure that happens in the background already anyway).
Using that score the feedback on flagged content is weighted, making it harder for bot networks or coordinated groups to manipulate the discourse.
Also, people receiving red flags repeatedly, get their social score reduced dramatically, leading to less and less visibility of their content.
Come on, LinkedIn, this can’t be so hard to implement and it would be better than simply doing nothing.
