How I Got A Premium Account on LinkedIn for Free.

I had been making a big fuss about Plagiarism on LinkedIn. I wanted to get LinkedIn people, especially those who are selling the LinkedIn Platform, to engage in a dialogue about this.  I wanted to find out if many people within the LinkedIn Company were even aware of the security and other risks to business we have uncovered.

So I searched for people like this using LinkedIn search. I mentioned the top people who came up in a newsfeed update about my plagiarism post.

I wanted to see what would happen when I did.

This was the result:

Well, ok it was a little naughty and provocative of me, in a good cause. But let's examine this response. Firstly, as this is a contractual matter, I would expect this to make sense, but
"you cannot your posts or comments ..." is not even proper english.

Then "with members who are not interested", now there's a can of worms for you. How on Earth do we know who is interested in a post before mentioning them? Indeed this would render the mention system useless. The note does not define this in terms of connections, followers or participation or any other way. Just subjectively in terms of the mentioned person. Well, I get mentioned about 100 times a day. What if I started flagging up ones I'm not interested in as such?  Would the mentioners be threatened this way too?

Take a look at the LinkedIn newsfeed after you've read this. Note just how widespread mentioning people and companies "cold" is. But more importantly, note examples of where people are attacked by misuse of mentions. I mean really trolling and abusive stuff. You can find it. That is what I call abuse. Yet there are people out there doing it as a hobby. Why have they never been threatened with termination? How come I've been singled out? Have you ever been notified or told this is an abuse? What I found about mentioning people on LinkedIn Help before I took the action above is entirely permissive. Nowhere does it state anything about "interested" or "abuse".

So I wrote a post along these lines on LinkedIn. It got an awful lot of attention, including by LinkedIn Pulse Editors who said they would look into it. The result of my challenge was this apology.

So that's the story of how I got my LinkedIn Premium account for free. Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the oil after all, even on LinkedIn.