LinkedIn Updates ToS, Goes Tough on Hate Speech

LinkedIn has proclaimed an updates on its Terms of Service (ToS) to every individual user of its services, warns of harassment and hate speech attracting permanent restrictions.

This follows the proposed European Commission new regulation on data, otherwise known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) set to take effect from May 8, 2018.

Sara Harrington, vice president of Legal at LinkedIn was quoted as saying that the ToS was to afford LinkedIn users an overview of some of what’s new.

These changes, Harrington said, impact the User Agreement, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Professional Community Policies and are effective May 8, 2018.

“Anytime we make updates, we hope to make it easy for you to understand your choices and the control you have over your data and content on LinkedIn,” Harrington said.

She outlined some of the details worthy of note to include that they are making it even easier to understand the data we have about you, how you can correct it and how you can ask us to stop using it.

“Our new settings give you more control over ads you see and more transparency about the data shared with advertisers,” she said.

Harrington cited for example, that harassment and hate speech are not welcome on our platform and could result in permanent restriction from LinkedIn.

“If you are being paid to share or endorse a product or service, you need to disclose that you’re being paid for your opinions or actions,” she advised.

According to her, refreshed community policies make sure LinkedIn stays a platform where people act professionally.

“Built from our well-established community guidelines, these policies encourage discussions that can help our members be more productive and successful, and outline what activity may be stopped by LinkedIn,” she said.

LinkedIn maintained that users privacy comes first in all of these updates.

“We now meet the high standard for data privacy introduced by the new European data protection law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect later in May. LinkedIn members around the world will benefit from many of these changes,” Harrington declared.