LinkedIn Limits Spread of QAnon Misinformation
This news article talked about LinkedIn’s most recent action in limiting the spread of QAnon group misinformation on its professional network. QAnon supporters promote far-right conspiracy theory, and LinkedIn has been hunting down there misinformative posts at their infancy and removing accounts that were posting them due to a violation of LinkedIn’s professional policy.
It’s been a critical question about how much social media companies should interfere with online free speech. There is a fine line between providing a safe online environment for users by practicing censorship and allowing enough freedom to all users. In this world of digital freedom and low entrance bar to voice an opinion online, it is extremely hard to monitor the spread of a particular group and limit its spread. A community can sprung up overnight by connecting thousands of users together, all from different networks. The formation of an online community is by combining originally separate network groups together, building bridge between them, and leading to the expansion of more connections. LinkedIn’s effort need to be further reinforced with strong measures to be taken to ensure maximum effect on these community networks.
The concept of the spread of misinformation on social media is based on what we learned in Networks. Nodes are interconnected to form different networks, and when people on social media start to reach out to other networks and build bridges between different groups, these separate networks become connected as well and form a mega network. There’s also the concept that if one person has good relationship with two other connected nodes, the other two people will likely form a positive relationship as well, which is how these communities are built on. It’s through the spread of words between connected nodes and likely their mutual connections and eventually extend to different networks. In order for LinkedIn to totally eliminate such group that spreads misinformation online, they need to find the bridges that connect these groups and possibly recognize spam accounts that spread misinformation.