Why Aren’t We Talking About LinkedIn? | NYT

Earlier in the article: "Now LinkedIn claims to have more than 645 million users, 180 million of them residing in North America. Last year, it produced more than $5.3 billion in revenue for Microsoft. (For scale, that’s about one-tenth the revenue of Facebook, Inc., about half of Instagram’s and almost twice Twitter’s.)"

"Mr. Thompson also estimates that his American followers on LinkedIn are more evenly distributed along the political spectrum, as compared to his followings on Twitter or Facebook, where they tilt liberal. But, he said, “filter bubbles aren’t as strong, in part because people aren’t posting as much about politics.” The 2020 field of candidates is doing plenty of hiring on LinkedIn, but don’t expect campaigning there. Political ads are banned on the platform. In 2017, the last year outside analytics firms could track such things, Forbes.com was the most popular source of news posted to the site, according to NewsWhip. (The majority of posts tend to deal in the genres of self-help, motivation and marketing.) Of the top ten stories of the second half of 2017, nine were explicitly about work, and one was about a solar farm in China that is shaped like a panda.

“The risk on Facebook is becoming too toxic,” Mr. Thompson said. “The risk on LinkedIn is becoming too cheesy.”"

Why Aren’t We Talking About LinkedIn? | NYT