How LinkedIn lied to us all: The game isn’t AI. It’s ID verification and social scoring.

The most important feature launched in 2023 went under our radar. In my last article, I covered how LinkedIn evolved from a job board and outreach platform to a knowledge hub and relationship management platform. Today, I’d like to go further and discuss where they are taking the platform, AKA, and where I think the money for LinkedIn will be. 

Disclaimer: None of this article's conclusions, ideas, or content has been disclosed to me officially or non-officially by any LinkedIn staff member. Ideas and conclusions presented here are the result of my 2+ years of work with founders on building their personal brands on LinkedIn, building my personal brand and getting clients based on that, product updates I get as one of the early feature adopters, PR articles including statements from Linkedin officials (cited in the article where relevant) and my ideas “what could come next.”

ID Verification

During my 2 years of work in personal branding for co-founders on LinkedIn, I noticed the only thing guaranteed as an outcome is that their community has a feeling they know, respect them, and know who to call if they need {something}.

Even if their current startup flops, they gain influence and connections they can reuse for other startups because people respect THEM and know them.

This is especially relevant for expats relocating to distant markets and tasked to expand the company’s presence in a new business community. It is tough for them to move physically and virtually, and that’s where I help with the virtual part. I’ve seen the service as a digital passport that, other than guaranteeing you are talking to a natural person, shows you a bit about who they are and what you can expect. 

Here are the signals that LinkedIn’s product indeed is taking that route with ID verification:

“LinkedIn has verified more than 55 million users for free to combat the spread of misinformation fueled by the rise of artificial intelligence. LinkedIn began verifying users in April 2023. The move followed social media platform X's decision in November 2022 to require users who wanted a verification badge to subscribe to its premium service. Social networks are stepping up their efforts to weed out inauthentic activity, including scams and misinformation, across their services.” (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

Markets of primary interest

LinkedIn launched the option of verification across two markets first:

1. United States - home base.
2. India - the fastest-growing job market. 

Choosing India as a “numero duo” made sense to me for several reasons: 

1. When I started providing personal branding services on LinkedIn in September of 2022, I perceived the biggest danger to my competitiveness were Indian influencers backed by LinkedIn and tasked with expanding the market. (Back then, I had no other USP than being good at writing and a change manager, and it wasn’t evident that AI would be unable to deliver the quality of content it promised.) These young women LinkedIn selected (usually women) were still college students and wrote really basic content with less-than-ideal English with thousands of likes based on the size of that market alone. As LinkedIn’s strategy is to provide a steady workforce supply to the platform and the US, it makes sense that they would enable Indian campus representatives and citizens, in general, to verify their identities along with US citizens. 
2. I was also actively involved as an MBA teacher for "Personal Branding & Business Communication" module at Indo-American ed-tech unicorn, upGrad , and I had first-hand insights into how LinkedIn was used by my students in - Holland, UK, US, Japan, Nigeria, North Korea, Iran, Yemen, India … 
3. I concluded that upGrad serves a similar purpose to US workforce needs as LinkedIn, it enables the best of the world to become visible and viable for a visa to work in UK and US. 
4. Working with upGrad and witnessing how fast they iterated, even as massive as they are, led me to conclude that the country is a force in the making. 
5. During my visit to LinkedIn’s NYC HQ and adjacent events during Tech Week, I met many stellar young Indians in New York who provided context on how India is being built and how fast it is. Still, if you want to succeed, your best bet is coming to America or the UK, which most Indians from better families eventually do.

India's landing on the Moon on August 23rd, 2023, was just a global power statement that they are here to stay. 

So far, most of the 55 million verified are probably Indians and Americans, but LinkedIn recently made global verification possible, making the feature globally accessible. 

Verification is free and is covered by LinkedIn.

“While peers charge users for verification, LinkedIn is verifying people for free and using a two-pronged strategy to have 100 million users verified by 2025. For users who work at big companies, LinkedIn contacts them through their corporate email addresses. This feature is currently limited to employees at select companies, but Rodriguez said LinkedIn is thinking about ways it can expand the verification technique. Its other verification method involves having users submit their government IDs with partners such as Clear and Persona and, for users in India, the digitization service DigiLocker. LinkedIn pays the verification partners for the service. The company didn't disclose how much it's spending on verifications, but Rodriguez called it "a sizable investment.” LinkedIn said it's taking a conservative approach in verifying users — for example, when a user's professional name doesn't match the name on their government ID — in order to make sure it preserves a high bar for the users it verifies." 

"We would rather get it wrong, as in potentially not verifying someone, as opposed to verifying someone that then we realized it was a wrong verification," Rodriguez said. (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

To know what a company cares about, watch where it funnels its money. Everything else is PR. LinkedIn's push for this and covering the cost of the verification is not an accident. Also, 100M users to be verified by EOY 2025 are 10% of the total user base (now over 1BN). They're paying for it instead of putting it on users, meaning they care about it. 

I suspect that by creating a relationship between your government ID and profile, LinkedIn eventually aims to eliminate duplicate (backup profiles) and ensure that people are “behaving” on the platform. Paired with high-quality content, there is no reason why a person halfway across the world wouldn’t believe you are indeed who you say you are. 

Algorithm changes favoring verified profiles

Investment means nothing if you don’t incentivize users to exhibit desired behavior. Here is another statement showing that LinkedIn plans to do just that: 

“The Microsoft-owned service said it has the most verified individual human identities of any major social network. The company will begin showing its user verification badges within the primary LinkedIn feed in November. Sachdeva said users are motivated to adopt verification because they use LinkedIn to find jobs. LinkedIn said verified profiles get 60% more profile views, 30% more connection requests, and 50% more post engagement than nonverified profiles. LinkedIn said it's going beyond individual users; it also verifies job listings and company pages.” (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

Apparently, verifying will positively impact your reach. More importantly, next to your name will be a little icon showing that LinkedIn has reasonable doubts about backing you as a real person whenever you pop up in someone else’s feed. This should eventually be a safety signal for us to engage with people on the network. 

Verification and AI. Friends or foes? 

It turned out that verification was a much more important feature than CLA (collaborative articles), for which I was an influencer. Here is why:

Most importantly, how they are rolling out the verification feature is strikingly different from how they rolled out the CLA feature. Notice how they said that they are being conservative and would rather shoot down someone real than verify someone fake. That’s not how they rolled out CLA. I mean, they did initially, but in 9 months, they sped it up, opting for mass adoption. It makes sense that they would have to be more careful with IDs since there might be legal repercussions, and there is nothing American business fears more than a lawsuit. Especially a company as big as LinkedIn, which has a lot to lose. (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

However, I also sense that LinkedIn figured out that AI might be more of a liability than an asset, so they dropped the CLA from their priority list. Paired with mass layoffs across LinkedIn in 2023, there were no resources to take care of CLA specifically, so they just let it flop. This leads us to the next item … 

The AI problem 

I will start with quotes here, as I see them as most important:

“Even before the rise of the generative AI era, fake accounts were a problem for LinkedIn. Spoof accounts have popped up for high-profile tech executives such as Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg. LinkedIn said it takes down 99% of fake profiles before users encounter them on the social network. Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn's vice president of consumer products, told CNBC that in the past, users could discern fake accounts from authentic profiles by looking at work experience and the photo.” (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

"You now see things like deep-fake videos and photos that are increasingly harder for the naked eye to understand if they're real or fake," Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn's vice president of trust and safety, told CNBC in an interview. "That line-blurring is what we believe poses a significant challenge in combating misinformation, faking expertise, etc. Being able to understand someone's authenticity will be essentially critical to how we see the internet progress in the future," he said. "We want to basically make it broadly accessible and build a trusted community on LinkedIn. In the world of AI, when you can generate photos left and right, it's not going to be that easy," she said. "Verification becomes another significant signal when you think about the platform all about professional connections and networking." (Quoted from source at the bottom of this article)

This quote shows LinkedIn is not very pro-AI, even with AI writing features launched for premium profiles. Those were moonshots, not strategic decisions. With the massive use of AI, they figured out that their USP is not liberalization but control and verification. Also, in the end, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, a "blue" company. 

Then, what is LinkedIn becoming? 

Here is where it becomes FUN. I suspect that LinkedIn has the potential to be the single largest worldwide digital ID platform that will tell you who you are dealing with. Microsoft’s battle for this unprecedented position of power will result in them funneling their resources AGAINST every product/extension/solution that will help people publish voluminous fake or AI-enhanced content. Looking far ahead, I can see profiles being rated based on the RAWNESS of their content. 

This aligns with my approach of not allowing clients to use AI in their content, videos, or overly designed visuals. 

The game is not about being pretty or liked. The game is about having social credit and being cleared as a natural person in the business world, no matter where you are or if your client sees your face in person. Covid has changed the game. 

Remote work is here to stay in every sense - employees, co-founders, partners, and vendors. 

If successful, Microsoft would be sitting on a resource of importance to Interpol, state governments, the World Bank, the UN, and almost every international institution needing to verify someone’s identity. 

Dangerous game, privatized public records of citizens. It is questionable how long they would keep it private or be forced to forfeit it to a public authority. 

Nevertheless, for those who took Apple's side in the game of Apple vs. Microsoft, it’s good to pause for reflection and realize how much of a powerful move Microsoft made by acquiring LinkedIn and their “distribution is the game” policy instead of “product quality.” When they acquired LinkedIn, it was not profitable. It was just a marketplace, which is hard to build and maintain. VCs don’t like them and have no idea what to do with them. In time, it worked itself out. 

And to think that with all these forces circling around and through LinkedIn, with the fate of our digital identities in the air, personal branding experts and ghostwriters sell you virality as value. 

My name is Miljana Nikodijevic. Go to my profile and check out my CV in the last 2 years. All of it? LINKEDIN. I have a consultancy/boutique The Silver Spear that digitizes, scales, and manages the social capital of founders of B2B long-sales cycle companies. We digitalize founders’ identities to increase trust and amplify their Rolodex no matter how many times they exit or crash. Invest in the only real estate guaranteed to take with you—social Capital. Be ready when Digital ID becomes a currency. (We work with equity holders, not executives.)

Sources used in this article:

1. CNBC article, “LinkedIn says it has verified 55 million users in an effort to combat AI's spread of scams, misinformation.”
2. My experience as a personal brand builder/manager for co-founders of B2B long-sales cycle companies expanding their presence in the U.S.
3. My brain.
4. 🤖 Chat GPT free since 1990!