Gatekeeping

Last week I wrote a post for this blog, and—as usual—tried to publicize it in LinkedIn. But I mostly failed. My very first post about the article (in my own timeline) went through well enough; but when I tried to cross post in special-interest groups, I invariably got the message, "Oops - we were unable to complete your request. Please try again later." And "trying again later" produced the same result. It was odd.

LinkedIn Customer Support has hitherto offered a number of theories for what happened, none of which match the facts of the case. (Perhaps I explained the problem in a confusing way at first; but as we have emailed back and forth, I have tried to make the picture clearer.) But I have been able to post other notifications since then. So it is clear to me that my account has not been blocked, and I have not violated some overall limit on the number of posts. As far as I can tell, the only plausible explanation left is that my post triggered a content filter. The filter must have determined my post to be spam, not because there were too many copies of it (There weren't.) but somehow because of what I said. In other words, I must have run afoul of some gatekeeping protocol.     

Gatekeeping isn't necessarily a bad thing, though in this case it proved inconvenient for me. In essence, gatekeeping is a form of preventive action. For example, many large companies have policies that require all their suppliers to be certified to ISO 9001. This is a gatekeeping requirement, and it is intended to weed out certain problems before they start. We have discussed at length that certification to ISO 9001 doesn't necessarily mean a company does good work. But it does mean that they have a way to handle complaints, and it does mean that they will work next week more or less the same way they worked this week. Those two reassurances—just by themselves—are huge. 

By the same token, if you determine that a certain sort of message interferes with the purposes of your online community, it's only natural to take action in advance to prevent that kind of message from ever being posted. I assume that the LinkedIn filters probably thought my post was some kind of advertisement—maybe even an advertisement for some kind of artificial intelligence tool. While advertising is allowed on LinkedIn, it has to go through a certain procedure before it is posted. It would not surprise me to learn that LinkedIn has tools—maybe even AI tools, ironically—that screen individual posts to look for advertisements that have been disguised as personal notifications. It wouldn't even surprise me if someone showed me a list of the features that this tool looks for, the features that identify a probable advertisement-in-hiding, and it turned out that by a simple accident I had written some of those features into my post—so that the gatekeeping tool rejected it.

It wouldn't surprise me. But at this point that's pure speculation. I have seen no such list yet, and LinkedIn Customer Service has not confirmed that this is the problem. I am just guessing.

But let's take this line of thought one step farther. We all know that if you are going to derive preventive actions or lessons learned from a problem investigation, the actions or the lessons have to be based in some kind of causal way on the things you learned during the investigation. In the same way, if you decide to gatekeep your social media community to keep out AI-based advertising (or whatever it turns out to be), you should make sure that this is what you are really doing in practice. Look at your algorithm closely, and review it from time to time. Also, if someone's posts get caught by the algorithm and he complains, that might mean he's a human being (rather than an AI) so you might be able to use that information to refine your algorithm even more. 

Meanwhile I'll try to write notifications that don't sound like ad copy. That's a preventive action on my part, to avoid this circumstance arising again.