Social Media abuses: Twitter polices, LinkedIn doesn’t

As soon as you toss a product into the social media mix, you can be sure that there will be people attempting to make money from the product by abusing it. Both Twitter and LinkedIn have drawn abusers and it’s interesting to consider the different designs of these systems. In my recent experience, Twitter’s design allows the mob to police itself and rid the group of abusers. LinkedIn doesn’t.

Twitter abusers have a pretty simple approach. They simply follow you to attract your attention. That act will generate an email telling you that you have a follower. What a rush! Someone else wants to read my Tweets regularly. However, when you check the profile of your new follower, you’ll see that they have posted exactly one Tweet and no one is following them. The one Tweet explains everything. Usually, it’s a come on to see their naked photos, registration required. Twitter’s email informing you that you have a new follower has a built-in link to immediately report the follower as a spam artist. Magically, the accounts of these spammers quickly get terminated. I am sure that’s because it’s easy to report the abuse by clicking the link.

Contrast this with LinkedIn, the “professional” social networking site. Here, the abuse is more complex and it takes the form of group discussions. LinkedIn groups are collections of thousands of like-minded people who sign up for a group to get news about and to discuss a particular topic like embedded design or EDA. These groups can have dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of members. Group membership requirements can be strict or lax but once you join, you have unlimited access to other group members through posted discussions. A lot of advertising takes place within these discussions and I have no objection when the discussions relate to the group’s purpose. In fact, I post pointers to my blogs in relevant technical groups. These posting are clearly labeled as pointers to blogs.

However, spammers are increasingly using the LinkedIn group discussions for unrelated advertising, such as for online gambling casino franchises in technical discussion groups. When you check the spammer’s LinkedIn profile, you’ll find they have no LinkedIn connections. That’s a sure sign of a social medial abuser. They’re not social. Worse, the spammer can embed links into discussions and these links can of course take you to all sorts of malware-laden pages on the Web if you’re unwary enough to click on them.

You’d think that LinkedIn would provide a way to mark such discussion spam so that the perpetrators can be quickly and easily ejected from the group, just as Twitter does. However, you cannot. You must compose and email a complaint to the group owner or manager and ask that the offending spammer be barred from the group. There’s no rule that the group owner/manager needs to acknowledge your email, act on it, or even read it. It’s an ad hoc approach to group policing. LinkedIn doesn’t make the policing process one-click easy the way Twitter does. Put simply, Twitter’s design demonstrates that Twitter has a low tolerance for spamming and LinkedIn seemingly has a pretty high tolerance. Which is the more professional?

The point that I’m making here is that product design needs to account for use models. All use models. If you’re tossing a design to the public, you need to assume that there will be some troublemakers in the mix.