LinkedIn is looking to add another incentive to get people to verify their information, by enabling users to prioritize engagement from verified users.
An updated page in LinkedIn’s Help Center outlines how users can sort comments by verified users, in order to focus on those who’ve confirmed their info.
As explained by LinkedIn: “At LinkedIn, we’re looking for new ways to help members more easily find authentic comments on posts with large comment volumes. Some members may see a new comment sort option called Verified Members, alongside Most Relevant and Most Recent. When selecting this option, you will see comments exclusively from users with verified profiles, helping you focus on insights from trusted professionals.”
Unlike Meta or X, LinkedIn verification is available free of charge, with users able to confirm their ID via third-party support partners, by sharing their government ID info.
LinkedIn reported in December that more than 100 million members had verified their identity in the app. The platform said it added an additional layer of trust and helped to combat spammers and bots.
Now, LinkedIn appears to be looking to make verification a bigger focus.
“This feature is designed to reduce the noise from automated, generic, or inauthentic comments, ensuring that meaningful, human-led discussions stand out in high-volume conversations,” LinkedIn said.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this impacts LinkedIn post engagement and motivates more users to get verified in order to maximize their in-app presence.
Because while 100 million verified members is a lot, LinkedIn has more than a billion members overall, meaning that it still has a long way to go in ensuring that its verification marks will be a big enough incentive to improve the security of conversations.
The more LinkedIn can weed out spam and automated bot comments, the more valuable its data stream will be, which could also make it a more important source of info for training future artificial intelligence systems.
LinkedIn content is now being highly cited by AI chatbots in their answers, which reflects trust in LinkedIn content. More bot responses could dilute that value, so LinkedIn has some pretty clear motivations to get more users verified and highlight verified user content in-stream.
