This is not the first time, and it probably won't be the last time, that a post on the professional social network LinkedIn is re-posted. Here is the post in question:
“I arrived 2 hours late to work because I didn’t hear my alarm this morning. My CEO’s reaction: “If you didn’t hear your alarm, it means you were tired. Sleep 1 hour more in the morning if you need to, no problem.” For me, that’s the difference between a boss and a leader.”
The authorship of this post has now become almost impossible to trace, azerbaijan telemarketing data and for good reason. In the space of ten days, hundreds of people have published this text on their LinkedIn account , with the hope of reaping a considerable harvest of "likes" and "comments" to boost their visibility on LinkedIn .
But this practice raises several questions:
What is the point of copying and pasting on LinkedIn?
Why is plagiarism not penalized by LinkedIn?
Is it time to quit LinkedIn?
What lessons can we learn from this regarding our visibility on LinkedIn?
Why copy and paste on LinkedIn?
It seems counterintuitive, but the answer is quite simple. When a LinkedIn post goes viral to the point of accumulating thousands of likes and hundreds of comments, it is for a good reason: the published content is popular. And it is very common for content creators on social networks to draw inspiration from American or Anglo-Saxon influencers. In the same vein, the most prominent French-language content is often a source of inspiration for content creators with more modest communities. Therefore, it is very tempting to “borrow” this successful post to take it on for your own and capture a certain success in turn. If the post works for person A’s audience, it has every chance of working for person B.
The process is therefore very simple: plagiarizing a LinkedIn post that works is done solely with the aim of obtaining visibility on LinkedIn in turn, visibility acquired all the more easily since it did not require any creative effort. A risky game, but one that Internet users sometimes seem to justify by telling themselves that the members of their community will not have seen the original post, so they can take it on their own without risk. This last point is subject to debate, we will come back to it.
Why is plagiarism not penalized by LinkedIn?
The answer to copy-pasting on LinkedIn may seem simple: why doesn't the social network LinkedIn penalize copiers? In practice, it's not so simple:
First, this means that LinkedIn would have to timestamp all posts, then compare posts that have similarities between them, to penalize those that would be published after the original post. In itself, this seems possible, but the risk of error remains high. And then, it is also difficult to penalize the fact that an image or video is taken up by several users.
Then, nothing excludes that several people could have had a similar adventure or situation. By what right would we punish people who would share similar experiences? In the case of this famous post about the two-hour delay, the string was simply much too big for it to seem plausible, especially since too many people ha
