Bill, I “wrote” this article about Linkiedin in case you’re up against a deadline. I hope this brings a 😊 to your face. Thank you for your devotion to writing your posts. Bill
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.
text on black background
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.
We had an employee we fired who smeared our firm and our staff individually on LinkedIn, posted pornographic imagery on our page, and posted all of our design work as her own. Then she blocked us, so we can’t see her posts. LinkedIn is pathetic in terms of follow up or takedown of content, they leave it up to users to solve these issues.
Yeah I personally started reading your stuff between all the spam, and I have to say I like it. But next time just write some unhinged shit that will both give you a chuckle and make sure that if anyone copies you again they'll regret it. Still love all your work though.
Bill, do you have an issue with readers posting some of your content as long as they give you the credit? I've seen that a lot on Linkedin. I wouldn't know if I'm seeing plagiarized content unless I'm connected to both the originator and the thief.
no that's fine — this person was copying and pasting as if they had written it themselves with no attribution. it probably didn't do that much good for them, but I was annoyed!
I guess this just shows my age but it was hammered into our heads from elementary school on up that to copy someone else’s work and not give them credit was plagiarism and punishable by copyright law. Anything we wrote, if we used anything of someone else we were to properly footnote. Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack is impeccable in her footnotes at the end of each newsletter. I’ve tried to make it a practice that when I make a note to cite later, I give credit to the author, the source and the published date. It’s just good practice.
I had a roommate in undergrad, she'd prop a book up next to the typewriter & just type away (no computers then, so, yep, that ages me). No footnotes for her by golly. Turned those papers is as her own.
Well it’s nice to know the current head of the SSA realized he “screwed up” when he screwed parents of newborns in Maine because he “was ticked” about how the Maine Governor acted towards Trump. (Never
mind his berating her.)
Yep. Feeling better and better about the security of social security. Sheesh
Bill, I “wrote” this article about Linkiedin in case you’re up against a deadline. I hope this brings a 😊 to your face. Thank you for your devotion to writing your posts. Bill
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.
text on black background
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.
I think the AP article means there are 119 million people without passports, not 119
We had an employee we fired who smeared our firm and our staff individually on LinkedIn, posted pornographic imagery on our page, and posted all of our design work as her own. Then she blocked us, so we can’t see her posts. LinkedIn is pathetic in terms of follow up or takedown of content, they leave it up to users to solve these issues.
Yeah I personally started reading your stuff between all the spam, and I have to say I like it. But next time just write some unhinged shit that will both give you a chuckle and make sure that if anyone copies you again they'll regret it. Still love all your work though.
the news about the Palestinian demonstrators against Hamas is wonderful!!!
Bill, do you have an issue with readers posting some of your content as long as they give you the credit? I've seen that a lot on Linkedin. I wouldn't know if I'm seeing plagiarized content unless I'm connected to both the originator and the thief.
no that's fine — this person was copying and pasting as if they had written it themselves with no attribution. it probably didn't do that much good for them, but I was annoyed!
I would be too.
I am very sorry to hear your article was copied and used as someone else's content. That practice is horrible and so unethical.
I guess this just shows my age but it was hammered into our heads from elementary school on up that to copy someone else’s work and not give them credit was plagiarism and punishable by copyright law. Anything we wrote, if we used anything of someone else we were to properly footnote. Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack is impeccable in her footnotes at the end of each newsletter. I’ve tried to make it a practice that when I make a note to cite later, I give credit to the author, the source and the published date. It’s just good practice.
I had a roommate in undergrad, she'd prop a book up next to the typewriter & just type away (no computers then, so, yep, that ages me). No footnotes for her by golly. Turned those papers is as her own.
Well it’s nice to know the current head of the SSA realized he “screwed up” when he screwed parents of newborns in Maine because he “was ticked” about how the Maine Governor acted towards Trump. (Never
mind his berating her.)
Yep. Feeling better and better about the security of social security. Sheesh