Global Business

LinkedIn faced an unprecedented challenge this year as users increased the number of posts they made by 50%, representing a record rise in content on the service. But the influx also led to more problematic posts, prompting LinkedIn to tighten its rules and expand its content moderation team.

But as events like the coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election led to increasing tensions both online and off, more posts on LinkedIn strayed from professional conversations to conspiracy theories, misinformation, and hate speech.

“We really needed to standardize and make clear what it meant to be constructive and respectful on LinkedIn,” said Liz Li, LinkedIn’s director of product management. 

This year, LinkedIn made a slew of policy changes, including prohibiting coronavirus-related misinformation in spring (the policy also extends to misleading information about the coronavirus vaccine). Following a rise in posts related to QAnon, a conspiracy … Read the rest

Texas shows us how Donald Trump could have averted his loss of the 2020 election. But nobody’s paying attention, lost in a tsunami of outlier claims of election rigging.

Trump’s most passionate loyalists, along with Trump, cling to the claim of a rigged election. Ineffectual as a challenge, that claim inoculates Trump from being branded a loser, his worst nightmare. And, as recently noted by the New York Times, it brings Trump hundreds of millions of dollars in ready political cash, enhancing his ongoing power.

Trump partisans cite some evidence of fraud, but none of it, according to Attorney General William Barr, a Trump loyalist, was of sufficient scale to have invalidated the election results. Trump must face the truth: He lost fair and square.

Instead of complaining about fraud, Trump should have done more to energize the voters who could propel him to victory. Consider, for … Read the rest

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Tonight’s the night: Saturn and Jupiter will appear closer in the night sky than they have in centuries, in an astronomical event called a conjunction.

The gas giants, the solar system’s two largest planets, will appear only 0.1 degree apart overhead on Monday. They’ll move slightly farther from each other during the rest of this week, but remain unusually close.

In the northern hemisphere, the duo can be seen shining brightly in the southwestern sky soon after sunset. In the southern hemisphere, they’ll glow in the western sky.

In reality, the planets are separated by 456 million miles of space. Jupiter, the more massive of the two, is about 550 million miles from Earth, and Saturn is roughly 1 billion miles away.

“Jupiter comes around every 20 years … Read the rest