One of the constants of social media services is their habit of penalising users without giving any avenue of appeal or recourse.
The latest example of this is Box Free IT’s story of how LinkedIn’s blacklist censors thousands of legitimate users.
Should the moderator of a LinkedIn discussion group choose to ‘block and delete’ a members’ message, that user is thrown out of the group, prevented from re-joining and have their posts in other groups pushed into a moderation queue.
‘Block and delete’ is a very powerful feature – a thin skinned administrator or a vindictive competitor can damage an individual or a LinkedIn reliant business – yet users have no means of challenging the block or undoing the effects.
This is fairly typical of social media sites; Facebook sanctions anyone who falls foul of their war on nipples while Google users who fall of the company’s algorithms find themselves in an administrative maze similar to something from a Kafka novel.
In every case, the social media service shows it’s unaccountable and opaque, which is ironic as these sites’ proponents preach about the new age of openness.
Once again, the Box Free IT story shows that businesses can’t afford to depend upon social media sites as primary marketing platforms. It’s essential that businesses use social media services to drive traffic to their own websites rather than risking losing their online presence because of an administrative mistake.
These risks are something that everyone using new media should keep in mind when building their online marketing channels.