How Corporate Social Media Is Bullshitting Workers, Employers, and the Business Community

By Cliff Potts, CSO & Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

The Professional Network That Isn’t

LinkedIn sells itself as the serious platform — the adult table of social media. Careers are supposedly built there. Ideas are exchanged. Opportunity flows to those who show up, engage, and “build a brand.”

That image does not survive contact with reality.

At the center of LinkedIn’s credibility problem is a single metric that looks meaningful but explains almost nothing: impressions.

On LinkedIn, an impression does not mean a post was read. It does not mean it was understood. It does not mean it influenced a decision, changed a mind, or opened a door. It means only that content appeared somewhere on a screen — often briefly, often passively, often while the viewer was already scrolling past it.

LinkedIn knows this. Most users do not.

The Metric That Misleads by Design

In advertising, “impressions” have always meant exposure, not engagement. That definition is standard across the industry. The problem is not the word itself. The problem is how LinkedIn presents it — stripped of context and inflated with implied importance.

When a worker sees that a post received thousands of impressions, the platform quietly encourages a false conclusion: people are paying attention. In reality, what likely happened is far more mundane:

The post loaded in feeds.
A fraction of viewers glanced at it.
Very few processed it.
Almost none remembered it.

Yet impressions are elevated as the headline number. Bigger number, bigger ego boost. More posting. More free content for the platform.

This is not education. It is engagement theater.

How Workers Get Played

LinkedIn positions visibility as a substitute for power. Workers are nudged to believe that frequent posting, relentless positivity, and algorithm-friendly opinions translate into opportunity.

So they perform.

They post during breaks. They polish corporate-safe takes. They chase impressions like proof that they matter in an economy that increasingly tells them they don’t.

When no job offers appear, no leverage materializes, and no stability follows, the failure is internalized. I didn’t post enough. I didn’t network hard enough. I didn’t brand myself well enough.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn collected the content, the data, and the ad revenue.

That is not empowerment. That is extraction.

Employers Aren’t Getting Truth Either

This isn’t just a worker problem. Employers and executives are being misled as well.

Impressions get mistaken for reach. Activity gets confused with influence. Engagement gets conflated with insight. The result is a feed saturated with recycled platitudes, performative humility, and algorithm-chasing noise that offers little strategic or operational value.

LinkedIn did not build a professional commons. It built a corporate echo chamber, optimized for volume rather than substance.

The Silence Is Intentional

LinkedIn could fix this tomorrow.

It could contextualize impressions.
It could foreground engagement rates.
It could explain what metrics actually mean — and what they don’t.

It chooses not to.

Inflated numbers keep people posting. Posting keeps the platform alive. Confusion is not a bug in the system; it is the system.

LinkedIn does not primarily serve workers or employers. It serves its business model. The rest is branding.

Why This Counts as Misinformation

WPS News has covered misinformation in politics, media, and geopolitics. Corporate platforms deserve the same scrutiny.

When a company knowingly presents metrics in ways that encourage false beliefs about visibility, value, and opportunity — especially in a fragile labor market — that is not neutral design. It is distortion.

LinkedIn’s metrics reframe structural economic problems as personal shortcomings. They encourage unpaid labor disguised as “professional growth.” They sell the appearance of relevance while delivering very little of it.

Call it what it is.

A professional platform that tells millions of people they are being seen — while knowing they are mostly being ignored — is not networking.

It is bullshit with a suit on.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References (APA)

LinkedIn. (n.d.). About impressions and reach on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Help Center.

IAB. (2023). Digital advertising metrics & measurement guidelines. Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Portfolio.

Wu, T. (2016). The attention merchants: The epic scramble to get inside our heads. Knopf.

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