Social: two things I’m thinking about today.
Nina Jervis wrote an article recently about LinkedIn and oversharing, apparently, a lot of people are sharing personal stories there in order to gain traction with their resumes.
I wouldn’t know. I pried myself loose from LinkedIn years ago. It was hard, not because I found it difficult but because they refused to let me go. If you’ve ever tried to close your LinkedIn account, you know what I mean.
This week, I’m spending my time sniping Russian disinformation online. I’m doing this because it’s something I can do to help Ukraine. Yesterday, after a discussion with an attorney, I realized not everyone knows how social media works, so I want to share a couple of pointers about hitting back at Russian trolls and bots on Facebook, where they do the most damage.
When you write a comment in response to a troll, bear in mind, you are not talking to them. You’re not trying to change their mind, you will never change their mind. What you can do is change the minds of the people who read the troll’s comment. But you will never do that by arguing with a troll. This is where the block function becomes your best tool.
Say you’re replying to a comment saying the U.S. is an Empire of Lies and Ukraine is governed by Nazis and drug addicts.
Remind people that the U.S. is not standing alone in their support of Ukraine, the whole world has sanctioned Russia, or talk about the fact that the Ukraine still has reliable internet thanks to Elon Musk and Russia does not, thanks to Vlad Putin. Point out the location of the person making their troll claims, it’s usually Indonesia or the Philipines or some other off-shore troll factory. Make your case, make it well, make it quickly, post the comment and then go to the troll’s profile and block them.
This makes your comment visible to others but invisible to the troll. Furthermore, they can’t respond to the comment even if they discover it’s there. Blocking takes you out of their realm of influence but you still have the advantage of leaving your footprint on their post. The only way they can see it and remove it is to use a second account to view the post, where the comment will be visible. If they want to remove the comment they will have to return to the original account, view the post and remove the whole thing.
So you’ve accomplished two things; you’ve corrected the misinformation and if your correction doesn’t stay up, you have forced them to go back, retrace their steps and post the comment again, you have wasted more of their time than they have taken from you with their original comment.
Ukraine needs our help. Russia is expert on using Facebook to poison the well. You can fight back for democracy and for Ukraine. So, I’m quiet because I’m doing a fair bit of that right now. Also learning to code is a good idea.
Okay, the other thing, it’s about LinkedIn, if you are a woman, LinkedIn probably works against you. You can cover gaps in your resume with some creative editing. You can’t cover anything on LinkedIn and while you might be able to win the begging contest with your heart rending story of how you overcame suffering, do you really want to spend your life working a job you landed out of pity?
I do not. You will not find me on LinkedIn, as far as the internet is concerned, I am a feral cat. It works better that way.
p.s. I can’t spend the extra five minutes figuring out a photo for this. We all need to call our Congressional Representatives and tell them we support Ukraine. We all have loads to do. If the information is helpful to you, great. If not. That’s fine too. I’m not going to engage in a debate about it or try to make it pretty. We all need to get down to serious work right now. There’s a whole world to save.
