Do not copy

Least of all, on LinkedIn!

We saw a comedian not long ago, who said that the early crowd (6:30 p.m. on a Sunday) had "big LinkedIn energy." Anyway, LinkedIn intrigues me.

• It can be useful, so I am told, for job hunters.

• While it's nowhere near the size of other social networks, it's managed to convince people to pay $60 per month for premium accounts.

• And, it's a breeding ground for cringe: spammy networkers and over-sharers, for example, along with those posts like: "I asked the love of my life to marry me last week. Here's what the experience taught me about B2B sales."

Anyway, I come here to bury LinkedIn, not to praise it, or at least in the hope of helping to throw some dirt on an apparent LinkedIn practice.

Specifically -- and autobiographically, as I was a victim of this more than I realized -- it's about blatantly plagarizing other people's work and posting it on this supposedly professional networking site as your own.

I was a bit surprised to hear from some readers of an article that I wrote for Inc.com a few years back -- telling me they liked it, and that they'd found it under another person's name on LinkedIn. He'd apparently been careless enough to have copied internal links that led to other things I'd written, which led these readers to me.

Is it against the rules? Yes, LinkedIn corporate told me (perhaps unsurprising), that plagiarism is against the rules, and LinkedIn will supposedly "disable accounts found using infringing content.”

Like a lot of other things, however, it's on the wronged and copied person to alert LinkedIn.

Anyway, I asked around, and found quite a few other people saying they'd had their work or even their identities copied on LinkedIn:

• An employer “stole my identity on LinkedIn to get a freelance job and submitted the work I posted as her own,” said Karen S. Dennis, of KSD Public & Media Relations.

• “A former client literally copied content directly from my LinkedIn profile and website to her profile ... when she started her own consulting business,” reported Keri Bonfili.

• "A subscriber to my list [told] me that someone was taking content,” Andrew Warner reported, “and using it as articles on LinkedIn as their own."

One person said she thought fighting would be futile after her content was copied, and that she responded by taking down her original version, out of fear that she'd be suspected of having copied the plagiarists.

I guess we’re living and working in a world now in which almost every professional needs to produce original content to stand out from the crowd. Yet, writing good articles and creating other things to share is hard work.

So people look for shortcuts.

LinkedIn’s process for reporting this kind of content theft is a bit involved; step one involves filling out a LinkedIn copyright infringement form, under penalty of perjury.

The company would clearly prefer that you “first attempt to resolve these issues amicably by contacting the alleged infringer directly to discuss a resolution,” according to its instructions.

Fortunately, a sternly worded email to the person who’d copied my post was all it took to get my copied work unpublished.

(I'm not going to post the links to either my original or the copy; honestly, it wasn't my best work, and I'm not eager to give the guy more traffic anyway.)

However, I started searching for the text of some of my most popular articles on the site and found many other members who’d done the same thing. I contacted a few, but eventually gave up.

Of course, I had some additional recourse, in that I could write this newsletter.

Frankly, I'm probably griping about the tip of the contentberg so to speak, as AI-generated content is clearly the wave of the future.

Silver lining: I came up with an idea for a LinkedIn post:

"What having my content stolen on LinkedIn taught me about B2B sales."

I'll probably never get around to writing that one, so if anyone wants it, feel free to copy it.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• President Trump signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul elections that would require voters to show evidence of citizenship to vote. The order lists three possible documents -- a U.S. passport, or a driver's license or military ID that has citizenship listed (birth certificates won't count). But, do licenses or U.S. military IDs show citizenship? That leaves only passports, something like 119 Americans over-18 don't have. (AP)

• The login portal of 23andMe’s website crashed as customers of the DNA-testing company rushed to delete their genetic data after it filed for bankruptcy. Some users have sought unsuccessfully to delete the data of a deceased family member, and many expressed uncertainty about whether or how they would receive confirmation that the data actually was deleted. (WSJ)

• Pope Francis, 88, came so close to death while in hospital with pneumonia that doctors had to choose whether “to let him go, or push forward.” At his own insistence, Francis returned home to Casa Santa Marta in Vatican City, where he must convalesce for at least two months as he continues treatment. (The Guardian)

• House Speaker Mike Johnson floated the possibility of simply eliminating some federal courts that have ruled against Trump in their entirety: "We can eliminate an entire district court. ... [D]esperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.” (NBC News)

• In a rare event in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, hundreds of Gazan citizens marched in the northern town of Beit Lahiya carrying white flags, calling to end the Hamas rule, and even calling to hand over the Israeli hostages. Though extremely rare, this is not the first time an anti-Hamas protest takes place in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip since the war began, as January 2024 saw what appeared to have been smaller and more sporadic events. (Jerusalem Post)

• The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, Lee Dudek, said he decided to require parents of newborns in Maine to apply in person for a Social Security number ( rather than by simply filling out a form at the hospital as they've done for decades) because he "was ticked" at the state's governor, Janet Mills, "for not being real cordial to the president.” Dudek continued after reversing the decision: "I screwed up. I’ll admit I screwed up." (Yahoo News)

• Florida has been working for years to crack down on undocumented immigrants, but some businesses in the state say they are now desperate for workers to fill low-wage and often undesirable jobs. The state’s legislature is debating a solution: loosening child labor laws, allowing children as young as 14 years old to work overnight shifts on school days. (CNN)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Greg Bulla on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!