LinkedIn Is a Fraud Built on Professional Labor

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — February 19, 2026

A Platform That Profits From Wasted Work

LinkedIn markets itself as a neutral engine of opportunity. It promises connection, visibility, and professional advancement. What it actually delivers is a system that quietly extracts labor while blocking the outcomes it advertises.

This is not a misunderstanding. It is the business model.

People are encouraged to invest time, expertise, writing, analysis, and emotional energy into LinkedIn under the belief that effort leads to exposure and exposure leads to opportunity. LinkedIn knows this belief is unreliable. It benefits from maintaining it anyway.

Labor Without Visibility Is Exploitation

On LinkedIn, following does not guarantee visibility. Expertise does not guarantee reach. Consistency does not guarantee recognition.

What is guaranteed is labor.

Professionals are told to “build a presence,” “show thought leadership,” and “engage authentically,” while LinkedIn’s internal systems routinely prevent their work from being shown to the very audiences they are trying to reach. This creates a one-way relationship: users give, the platform decides whether anything comes back.

That is not networking. That is extraction.

When labor is encouraged but structurally devalued, the correct word is exploitation.

How This Mirrors U.S. Institutional Rot

The United States is full of institutions that still perform legitimacy while quietly abandoning their purpose. They keep the language. They keep the branding. They keep the rituals. But the substance is gone.

LinkedIn is a digital expression of that same decay.

It talks about merit while suppressing expertise.
It talks about connection while blocking distribution.
It talks about opportunity while wasting people’s time.

This is not a technical failure. It is institutional rot expressed through software.

The Global Spillover

Because LinkedIn is global, the damage does not stop at U.S. borders.

Its incentive structure teaches professionals everywhere the wrong lesson: visibility matters more than accuracy, performance matters more than substance, and gaming the system matters more than doing the work.

That lesson degrades professional standards worldwide. It hollows out discourse. It replaces knowledge with noise.

The Cost Is Real and Measurable

Time spent producing unseen work is not harmless. It is lost income, lost opportunity, and lost momentum. For freelancers, consultants, job seekers, and analysts, these losses compound.

LinkedIn’s system is designed so users cannot easily distinguish between lack of interest and lack of distribution. That ambiguity protects the platform and harms the people who rely on it.

This is not accidental. It is profitable.

Call to Action: Stop Treating This as Normal

LinkedIn should not be treated as a neutral tool. It should be treated as a powerful intermediary that is accountable for how it handles professional labor.

At minimum, professionals should demand:

• Plain-language disclosure of how distribution actually works
• Clear acknowledgment that following does not ensure visibility
• Transparency about when and why content is suppressed
• Recognition that unpaid professional labor is being monetized

Absent that, LinkedIn’s claims about adding value amount to false representation.

Conclusion

A platform that profits from professional labor while denying professionals meaningful visibility is not enabling opportunity. It is selling a story it does not deliver.

LinkedIn is not merely flawed. It is fraudulent in its core promise.

And professionals should stop blaming themselves for outcomes that are engineered against them.