Trust and safety

New LinkedIn profile features help verify identity, detect and remove fake accounts, boost authenticity

I have the pleasure of hearing from you and members across LinkedIn how much value you get from our professional community we’re building. Equally important, is that in order for you to find that next job, learn new skills, or connect with others, you want to feel confident that the people you come across are authentic. 

In June, companies globally reported a rise in fraudulent activity across the internet, and I shared in this post about how we were tackling the issue on LinkedIn. I am eager to share that as part of our ongoing commitment to keeping LinkedIn a trusted professional community, we are rolling out new features and systems to help you make more informed decisions about members that you are interacting with and enhancing our automated systems that keep inauthentic profiles and activity off our platform. Whether you are deciding to accept an invitation, learning more about a business opportunity, or exchanging contact information, we want you to be empowered to make decisions having more signals about the authenticity of accounts. 

Here’s a preview of what we’re testing and rolling out globally over the next several weeks, and how it’s designed to help keep you safe.

Introducing “About this profile”

We’re adding a new “About this profile” feature that will show you when a profile was created and last updated, along with whether the member has verified a phone number and/or work email associated with their account. We hope that viewing this information will help you make informed decisions, such as when you are deciding whether to accept a connection request or reply to a message.

Starting this week, you can find the "About this profile" feature on each LinkedIn member's profile page, and soon you'll see it in more places over the coming weeks, including when viewing invitations and messages. For work emails, our plan is to start with a limited number of companies, but you can expect to see this expand as we add additional companies over time.

Mockup of "about this profile" feature

Detecting fake accounts using AI-generated profile photos

We’re seeing rapid advances in AI-based synthetic image generation technology and we’ve created a deep learning model to better catch profiles made with this technology. AI-based image generators can create an unlimited number of unique, high-quality profile photos that do not correspond to real people. Fake accounts sometimes use these convincing, AI-generated profile photos to make their fake LinkedIn profile appear more authentic.

Our new deep-learning-based model proactively checks profile photo uploads to determine if the image is AI-generated using cutting-edge technology designed to detect subtle image artifacts associated with the AI-based synthetic image generation process without performing facial recognition or biometric analyses. This model helps increase the effectiveness of our automated anti-abuse defenses to help detect and remove fake accounts before they have a chance to reach our members. 

Helping stop suspicious messages

We’re adding a warning to some LinkedIn messages that include high-risk content that could impact your security. We may warn you about messages that ask you to take the conversation to another platform because that can be a sign of a scam. These warnings will also give you the choice to report the content without letting the sender know. Here’s what those messages will look like:

 

Mockup of LinkedIn conversation

We’re excited to start rolling out these new features. What you’ll see in the future are updates on how we’re finding new ways to improve automated systems for fake account detection and removal, plus more member features to help keep everyone safe.