Governing a digital society needs careful thought as each action may have unintended consequences. Case in point: Site Wide Automated Moderation (SWAM) on LinkedIn.

I have enjoyed LinkedIn, especially participating in the group discussions around topics and links to articles of interest. Unfortunately I was removed and blocked from a group; the result had cascading effects across all the other groups I am associated with. I had been SWAM’d.

SWAM flips a switch that restricts a person from freely making comments within ALL the groups they are a member of. There is no undo switch. The restriction may be lifted per group by each group owner. In theory that sounds ok, however try getting an owner of a group with more than a few hundred members to bother, much less those who have thousands, or hundreds of thousands. It’s just not practical to expect individual attention.

A group owner has every right to block an individual from their group.  However, allowing a single group owner to SWAM a person without verification of an offense having taken place, puts a lot of power on a single group owner. It turns that owner into a dictator, knowingly or not.

I was given no warning; my freedom of speech was all of a sudden gone. In my efforts to get to the cause of my SWAMing I found it was done in error. The LinkedIn customer support is very polite although they can’t do anything to fix the problem because the system is broken. There is (currently) no graceful recovery.

This is just one tiny example of potential tyranny within digital societies.

In fairness, we have to remember that we are just at the beginning of digital societies and there are likely going to be a lot of mistakes. In fixing our mistakes, our collective interest should be in what is best for society, digital and physical. I vote for a democracy.

Meanwhile I curse the system for making the LinkedIn society much less useful than it used to be.

Addendum 11/26
I joined a linked in SWAM support group and as a way of introducing myself to the group I posted a link to this story, the first comment I received stated no BLOGVURTISING. Great support, I am really not feeling the love on LinkedIn.