Sarah Wight’s Post

Read my latest article on additional changes we're making to meet requirements of the new Digital Markets Act in Europe.

At LinkedIn, we follow the local laws that apply to us. It's the right thing to do, and LinkedIn members expect it of us. Read my latest article on how we're meeting requirements of the new Digital Markets Act in Europe.

Recently we won our legal case against TopSocial and SocialBD24, websites that built a business on creating fake LinkedIn profiles to generate inauthentic engagement. We’re encouraged by our decisive win, and will continue to leverage all available tools - including legal action when necessary- to ensure the LinkedIn community remains trusted and authentic. We’re committed to protecting your experience on platform, and will continue to invest in measures that prevent fake accounts and fake engagement. We’ve recently rolled out Identity Verification (https://lnkd.in/gQbshSgJ) to help you feel confident that the people you interact with are who they say they are. We’ll continue to develop our teams and technology to prevent fraudulent activity on platform and keep our community trusted.

At LinkedIn, we understand that trust is paramount. Check out this exciting opportunity to join our growing Legal enforcement team and lead individuals working to stop abuse on LinkedIn.

I’m proud to share that today we took another step in our fight against fake accounts and inauthentic engagement on LinkedIn by successfully resolving claims against two defendants we sued in January. As part of the resolution, defendants Ahamed and SocialBD24 agreed to stop selling fake engagement services (such as fake followers or likes) on LinkedIn, and to never again access LinkedIn using fake accounts, or otherwise violate LinkedIn’s User Agreement. We know people come to LinkedIn with the expectation that they can authentically build their brand, share their experiences, and connect with other professionals. Taking legal action against those who abuse our platform is just one of the many ways we will continue to work to keep LinkedIn a safe and trusted platform for our members.

This International Women's Day is an opportunity both to celebrate women's success and to ask ourselves why the global gender gap in senior leadership is still so large and narrowing so sluggishly. Two things I believe could help close that gap: Focus on Sponsorship. While mentorship and training can be beneficial, ultimately women need allies and sponsors who recognize their ability to lead and are willing to use influence to create opportunities for those women to do so! Imagine the progress we could make if every senior leader committed to working to develop a meaningful sponsoring relationship. Address Gender Equity in the Home. The majority of women are already CEOs - of their households. Achieving parity in the workplace will require tackling gender inequality at home. As a huge fan of Eve Brodsky's "Fair Play," I recommend the book and documentary to anyone who shares household responsibilities with a partner. We can try to embody at home the changes we wish to see in the world. #iwd23

People come to LinkedIn with the expectation that their experience will be real and trustworthy. Teams across LinkedIn, like the ones I lead, are constantly working to meet that expectation, from helping people make informed decisions about who they are interacting with, to taking legal action against those who abuse our platform.  Today we filed a federal lawsuit against two websites, TopSocial24[.]com and SocialBD24[.]com, and their founders who have built a business on creating fake LinkedIn profiles to generate inauthentic engagement. These actions directly violate our User Agreement and harm people who come to LinkedIn for a trustworthy and authentic experience interacting with other professionals.  We will continue to work to protect our members who come to our platform to build their brand, share their experiences, and connect with other professionals. We will use all available tools, including legal enforcement, to ensure the LinkedIn community remains authentic.

Today, we won a six-year legal battle against hiQ on behalf of every member on LinkedIn. hiQ has agreed to a permanent injunction requiring hiQ to stop scraping and to destroy all source code, data, and algorithms created when hiQ scraped member profile data in violation of LinkedIn’s User Agreement. This is a final, decisive victory against a company that illegally scraped our members’ profile data, used fake accounts, and attempted to build a business on abusing LinkedIn’s platform and our members’ privacy.  This establishes an important legal precedent to stop this kind of abuse in the future and reaffirms that LinkedIn’s User Agreement unambiguously protects members from unauthorized data scraping and fake accounts. We remain committed to protecting the people who use our platform and to fighting to ensure that control of personal data remains where it belongs – with our members.