Surviving LinkedIn’s Toxicity
There once was a time when I was active on all the social media platforms, or at least all the big ones. That feels like a lifetime ago. These days I really only use two: Instagram and LinkedIn.
I basically only use Instagram for one purpose: food. I find it an invaluable source of both delicious recipes and interesting places to go out to eat. I can’t remember the last time I actually posted anything on the platform. I basically just use it for ideas when I’ve run out of inspiration in the kitchen or feel like eating out.
LinkedIn is the only platform I truly use in the sense of contributing content and engaging with others.
I used to think LinkedIn was a bastion of sanity and healthy communication in an otherwise toxic social media landscape. Perhaps it once was. I think there was always a certain amount of unhealthy grandstanding and comparison game-playing on LinkedIn, but compared to Facebook and Twitter, it always seemed less poisoned by disinformation and mean-spiritedness.
Nowadays, not so much. Lately when I go on LinkedIn, I’m likely to learn one or more of the following lessons:
My job is more exciting and more prestigious than yours.
Justin Trudeau is somehow simultaneously an evil Satanic genius and an inept trust-fund dunce who is singlehandedly responsible for turning Canada into a third-rate impoverished disaster of a country.
Israel is a grubby little colonial Apartheid state in the Middle East that basically got what it had coming to it on October 7, and is now committing the equivalent of the Holocaust on the people of Gaza.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a corrupt oligarch who has his greedy hand in the US cookie jar.
Environmental activists are either eco-terrorists or delusional fairies-and-unicorns nincompoops, or both, and they’re all out to destroy the economy and the lives of honest working people.
Harm reduction programs have been an abject failure and drug addicts should simply be thrown in jail.
Gen Z’ers are all lazy, entitled snots who wouldn’t know a hard day’s work if it bit them in the ass.
Donald Trump is simply a victim of a vast legal conspiracy driven by a vast liberal deep-state cabal, and his only “crime” has been hurting left-leaning people’s feelings.
Did I mention that my job is more exciting and more prestigious than yours?
I just got an exciting new job/promotion/accreditation/etc. and you didn’t, ha ha!
This all probably says something about the nature of my LinkedIn network. In contrast to my Facebook network (which I never engage with these days), my LinkedIn connections seem to skew old and conservative. I’m sure if I spent more time on Facebook, I’d be inundated by messages telling me that Pierre Poilievre is racist and homophobic, that the oil and gas sector should be shut down yesterday, and that we should all abandon our cars in exchange for jungle vines. Middle ground? Pshaw!
But I don’t think it’s just me. I hear similar complaints from others, and if you Google “LinkedIn” and “toxic” you get a plethora of blog posts like this one. Clearly a lot of people feel the same way about the platform. As far as the partisan bile that has poisoned this and all the other social media platforms, that’s relatively easy to moderate, as I’ll get into.
As for the other side of LinkedIn toxicity—the egotistical self-aggrandizement—that’s a tougher nut to crack, and one that necessitates that we all look closely at what we post.
Too Many Voices
Some of this toxicity could be alleviated by culling one’s network. I currently have more than 1,100 LinkedIn connections. Of these, probably half are people I have no recollection of connecting with and I have no idea who they are. I think a lot of these are people I interviewed for magazine articles a decade or longer ago and that I’ve spoken with roughly once. Back in those days I viewed everyone as a potentially important career contact. I’ve come to realize now that hardly anyone is.
These days I’m very choosy about who I connect with on LinkedIn, and I reject most invitations I receive. I still accept the odd unsolicited invitation when I look at the person’s profile and find it particularly interesting or relevant to work I’m doing, but the vast majority are people I’ve never heard of who are reaching out to me because a) they think I can get them a job, b) they want to sell me something, or c) they’re just looking to pad their network.
As for pruning my network, I’ve already unfollowed a small handful of people whose content I was finding particularly obnoxious. You don’t even need to fully disconnect from people in order to remove them from your feed—you can just unfollow them. But I think I need to do more than this for my digital hygiene. There’s just simply too much content in my LinkedIn feel and I find the sheer volume of it to be bad for my psychological well-being. That and I’m a very different person than I was a decade ago and a lot of what I followed then doesn’t do anything for me now.
The only thing keeping me from doing a major cull is the time commitment involved. One of these days I’ll get around to it.
The Narcissism of LinkedIn
At what point does healthy positive self-regard morph into something ugly? I think the answer can be found somewhere on LinkedIn, specifically how people handle brag-worthy career moments and self-promotion.
There are a number of people in my LinkedIn network who I generally respect but that I get really tired of hearing from on the platform. These are the people who, while generally very pleasant in real life, never cease to pump out LinkedIn post about their latest webinar offering, the latest conference in an enviable location they’re attending, or even posts that have nothing to do with career stuff, like athletic achievements paired with irritating motivational quotes.
To be sure, there are healthy, non-toxic ways of celebrating your own successes. One of my favourite people in my LinkedIn network is Edmonton-based career coach Barb Penney, who is probably the city’s best resume coach, and someone who has helped me out a couple of times in my career. Her recent post about being selected as one of Edmonton’s top 15 coaches—definitely something to brag about—is humble and self-deprecating in a genuine way while sharing the spotlight with others and keeping the focus on paying it forward.
There are others too who manage to stay humble despite innumerable career successes and who consistently share quality content while giving positive shout-outs to others on the network. But more often than not, the self-congratulatory stuff on LinkedIn is self-centred and narcissistic. And when the size of your network is over a thousand, it starts to feel like everybody everywhere is being promoted and accoladed and being jetted off to exotic locales except you. It’s a great way to feel like a big fat failure.
As someone who tries to give people the benefit of the doubt, I don’t think people mean to be self-centred and narcissistic on LinkedIn. I think the problem is largely due to the platform’s design. For example, when you get a new job, and you enter in your new position details on LinkedIn, the platform automatically generates a celebratory post for you, and unless you take the time to edit it or opt out of it in favour of a different way of announcing it, it comes across as a boast. And as we’re all busy people, I get it that it’s a lot easier to go with an auto-generated post.
I think LinkedIn’s problems are the same as social media’s problems generally. Just as Facebook makes people resent each other through picture-perfect family and vacation photos and the like, LinkedIn sets us up to resent each other’s career successes in a really ugly way. It’s hard work communicating your genuine personality on social media and most of us don’t have that kind of time. If we don’t, though, we risk coming across as one-dimensional brag machines, because that’s the default setting.
Surviving and (Even) Thriving on LinkedIn
I’ve come to accept LinkedIn as a necessary evil in my professional life. Overall, I would say my life is better for having been on it all these years. I’ve benefitted from it in terms of job and training opportunities, and I can honestly say that there are enough people whose content on it I actually like to make the dark side of the platform worth tolerating.
That said, the dark side of LinkedIn is very real, and I’ve only recently begun to take steps to better cope with it. I’ve started by quietly eliminating certain people and groups from my network. Basically, if a person reliably makes me feel yucky on a social media platform, they’re gone. The way I see it, if they make me feel yucky via social media, they’re probably not people I want to engage with professionally either and I’m no doubt not going to miss them when they’re gone.
A bigger challenge has been to limit my own time on the platform. Like any other social media vehicle, LinkedIn has an addictive quality to it, especially if you’re someone whose profession is heavily reliant on networking and connection building. I know I have the tendency to OD on LinkedIn anytime I’m looking for work, be it full time or freelance, and the longer I spend on it, generally the worse I feel about myself. I’m a big believer in scheduling my days, and I’ve found I can limit my noxious exposure on LinkedIn by giving myself a set amount of time to spend there.
Having my own website helps. Before I launched this site, I felt forced to spend more time on LinkedIn, as it was my only online repository of all things related to my career. This site has allowed me to carve out my own little corner of the Internet and focus on creating the kind of content I want to create, which I can then inject into my LinkedIn network in the hopes of contributing something positive amid all the noise.
My rule for posting content on LinkedIn is simple: is anybody going to benefit from my posting this comment or link? Sometimes that person who benefits might be me, as in the case of announcing some minor or major career victory. It feels good to get kudos from your peers and I wouldn’t begrudge that of anyone. That said, if there’s any way I can do it that will benefit people other than me, this is obviously the way to do it. The post I linked to earlier here is a perfect example of how you can use a “brag” post to simultaneously elevate others.
I always try to keep in mind that my voice is one out of hundreds or even thousands in other people’s LinkedIn networks. I can pretty much guarantee that among my 1,100-plus connections, somebody right now is having a really crappy day, and their day is not going to get any better by hearing me trumpet my latest career achievement at full blast. We all contribute to each other’s digital hygiene, and for that reason I’m mindful of what I put out there.
If you’re reading this article through one of my LinkedIn posts, please don’t take this as me saying I don’t want to hear about your career successes. I do. When it’s a person I like and respect and the tone isn’t grating, I love hearing about people’s triumphs, big and small. I’m still naïve enough to think that social media could potentially be a force for good in this world as a mechanism for people to celebrate one another. The tools are there for it. It’s only our gnawing insecurities and our toxic habits that are stopping us.
All the social media platforms are rife with toxicity, and LinkedIn is no exception. But while none of us can fix the platform as a whole, we can all contribute to a healthier environment within our own digital ecosystems—while occasionally purging those ecosystems of invasive species. These tools aren’t going away anytime soon. We might as well make them as tolerable as possible.
Got any ideas for promoting positivity and curbing toxicity on LinkedIn? If so, I’d love to hear about them. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or my website to share your ideas. And if you ever catch me engaging in what you feel is unhealthy behaviour on LinkedIn (or anywhere for that matter), please call me out (politely). I’m sure I’ve been guilty of some of the things I’m criticizing here, and I want to be as good a digital citizen as I can.
