About three months ago, I wrote a post on LinkedIn describing the possibility that LinkedIn may be using its new games as a recruiting metric and how I built a bot to solve Queens as a result. At the time I was half-kidding; it seemed like there were far to many obstacles such as fairness, relevance, and cheating that would prevent LinkedIn from being able to use these games in any effectual way.
Yesterday, however, I woke up to find that the post had been taken down for violating LinkedIn community guidelines. This immediately piqued my interest; after all, I hadn’t actually violated any guidelines, so a reaction like this seemed to indicate that there may be more to my suspicions than I had initially thought.
The first thing I did upon receiving this notice was to review the actual guidelines in question. Attached to my takedown notice was a citation of this particular clause (you can review this section here):
We don’t allow content that facilitates the purchase of illegal or dangerous goods and/or services, prostitution, and escort services. We don’t allow content that promotes or distributes fake educational and/or professional certifications, sale of scraped data, proxy test-taking, or instructions on creating forged official documents. You may not use LinkedIn to hold lotteries, contests, sweepstakes, or giveaways. Do not use LinkedIn to sensationalize or capitalize on tragic events for commercial purposes.
It’s fairly easy to see that a post about a bot designed for a LinkedIn game doesn’t cleanly fall into any of these categories. The closest it gets is perhaps “proxy test taking,” but again, these games aren’t tests, right? However, even after appealing the takedown on these grounds, the post remained removed.
There’s no clear moral here - this could have easily been an over-zealous moderator who felt it was in the best interest of LinkedIn not to have bots on their platform. However, I must add that if the games were only meant to foster community engagement and drive users to return to the platform, a post about a bot shouldn’t have appeared threatening. New York Times, for example, certainly isn’t concerned about people cheating on Wordle. Yet - here we are, and I can’t help but wonder if there’s something (like performance stats) that LinkedIn wants to protect for its current or future use.
So if you’re on the hunt for a job currently, it may be worth picking up a bot or two just to be safe - it’s a small effort to make for a potentially large payoff.