Case Study in Enshittification

Over the past month, I’ve submitted half a dozen reports to the LinkedIn Trust & Safety Team for suspected spam or inauthentic activity.

The number that were found to go against the Professional Community Policies: zero.

It turns out that Microsoft, indeed, does not have better defenses than other consumer social media platforms.

But, wait, there’s more!

Rather than implementing rich text formatting to facilitate readability like an actual, mature blogging platform, LinkedIn instead prioritized AI-powered “Takeaways” to summarize long walls of plain text.

But, wait, it gets worse!

When prompted for details about “Takeaways”, one of the follow-up prompts asks how to disable them.

The AI-hallucinated response in LinkedIn sources a link to disable search results in the Google app.

Wut 😅

LinkedIn is a Microsoft property.

Google is an Alphabet property.

In what amounts to either epic levels of purposeful shade, or a spectacular fail, the Microsoft Bing “AI” feature suggests that the way to disable it is to…turn off the Google Generative AI search results.

Between inauthentic activity, inaccurate recommendations, and unresponsive customer support this is a case study in exactly how platform enshittification works.