Is LinkedIn Being Carefree? – Alen Cohen’s False CEO Experiment – Nextr Technology Blog

Hey, readers! LinkedIn has always been a great social media app for professionals. It includes all the necessary features that make it a top-grade networking and professional community app. But, as always, this app also has some flaws that cannot be ignored when it comes to truthfulness and security. This blog discusses an experiment done by a US man on LinkedIn. You’ll get to know about LinkedIn’s particular flaws we’re talking about. Let’s move forward!

Knowing Your Go-to Platform – LinkedIn

Here’s your go-to social media platform, which can positively affect your career and job hunt, along with business marketing. Besides, it is a great platform to connect with professionals as a brand. You can access an excellent opportunity to connect with job seekers who are also your users. Here we go with the best features of this social media platform:

Company pages: Firstly, you can create a company page on LinkedIn that showcases your brand. Moreover, a perfect company page helps you develop trust in your connections and users.
Groups: Secondly, you can share various articles and content on LinkedIn groups to spread knowledge related to your services. You can use your expert knowledge to share the necessary content.
Content and article: Likewise, you can showcase your expertise and knowledge with brilliant posts and articles.
Ads on LinkedIn: Thereafter, you run ads on the platform to get attention and attract users.

The Boldest or Funniest LinkedIn Stunt Yet

So, first of all, imagine this—you wake up one morning, sip your coffee, and, with a few keystrokes, update your LinkedIn profile to say “CEO of LinkedIn.” You sit back, waiting for alarms to go off, for LinkedIn’s moderators to storm in and shut your account down. But nothing happens.

No warnings. No verifications. No raised eyebrows. This is exactly what happened when a US man took self-promotion to the next level. He casually declared himself the CEO of LinkedIn—on LinkedIn itself—and the platform didn’t even seem to care. How easy is it to manipulate online professional identities? How much do we trust what we see on these platforms? And is LinkedIn as credible as we believe it to be?

Understanding the Whole Situation

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site, is where recruiters and professionals go to verify credentials, connect, and build careers. The idea that someone could fake their way to the top of a billion-dollar company—on the very platform that’s supposed to track authenticity—sounds insane. But here’s the thing – LinkedIn, despite its reputation, does not have a robust system for verifying job titles. Unlike Instagram or Twitter (now we call it X), where verified checkmarks exist to confirm identities, LinkedIn mainly relies on user honesty and employer confirmations—both of which can be manipulated. This means you could technically list yourself as the President of Mars or the Head of Google’s Time Travel Division, and as long as nobody calls you out, the platform might let it slide. And that’s exactly what happened here. A man simply added “CEO of LinkedIn” to his job history, and the system didn’t even flinch.

Why Didn’t LinkedIn Take It Down?

You’d think a professional platform owned by Microsoft would have tight controls in place. After all, LinkedIn is where people build careers, businesses find employees, and industries connect. If people can fake their credentials so easily, doesn’t that undermine the platform’s credibility?

The truth is that LinkedIn’s job title verification system is almost non-existent. There’s no automated process that checks if you actually work at a company before adding it to your profile. Some organizations use “LinkedIn Company Pages,” which allow verified admins to control who can list themselves as employees. But this system isn’t foolproof, and it only works if a company actively manages it.

For smaller companies (or even giant corporations like LinkedIn, apparently), anyone can claim to work there without immediate detection. And unless someone manually reports it, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to care. This raises an important question – how much can you really trust what you see on LinkedIn?

The Era of Self-Proclaimed Titles

This case isn’t just about one guy faking his job title for laughs. It’s a symptom of a larger trend—the age of self-proclaimed expertise and digital identity inflation.

The truth is that LinkedIn is full of inflated job titles, and this incident just took it to its extreme. People are branding themselves as leaders, executives, and experts without any real accountability. And since LinkedIn doesn’t have a strict verification system, the line between real qualifications and self-marketing is getting blurry. So, when someone blatantly calls themselves CEO of LinkedIn, is it really that different from thousands of other professionals stretching the truth on their profiles every day?

What Does This Mean for LinkedIn?

This whole situation should be a wake-up call for LinkedIn. The platform thrives on credibility, and if people start questioning whether job titles are honest, it could lose its authority as a professional network.

Some possible solutions could include:

Better verification systems – Maybe it’s time LinkedIn introduced “verified employment badges”, where companies officially approve employees before they can list a job.
More active moderation – Instead of waiting for users to report false claims, LinkedIn could use AI-powered detection to flag suspicious job titles.
A reality check for users – Professionals should take LinkedIn profiles with a grain of salt. Just because someone claims to be an expert, CEO, or thought leader doesn’t mean they are.

This case is funny, but it also exposes a fundamental flaw in how we perceive professional credibility online.

Conclusion

In conclusion, LinkedIn is a great professional networking app, but it is too weird to say that there’s no one checking it out, maybe. People are creating their profiles and showcasing their previous and current roles, but we can’t know if it is correct and trustworthy. And this experiment proves it! Nextr Technology is the best web development agency in Delhi. We provide insightful articles to create awareness and understanding among users and professionals. To know more, contact us!

Thank you for reading