SOCIAL

LinkedIn Expands Roll-Out of LinkedIn Stories to Australia

Published

2 years ago

June 21, 2020

Following on from its initial launches of LinkedIn Stories in Brazil, the Netherlands and the UAE, LinkedIn users in Australia can now also access the new, vertically-aligned, temporary status update option.

As you can see in this sequence, LinkedIn Stories, which the company confirmed were coming back in February, function pretty much the same as they do on Facebook and Instagram, with a Stories bar along the top of the main feed, and various stickers and tools available to decorate your Stories frames.

When you first access a LinkedIn Story, you’re prompted to check your privacy settings for Stories viewing.

That aligns with LinkedIn’s regular capacity for users to see who’s viewed their profile – if you don’t want people to see that you’ve checked out their LinkedIn story, you can switch this off via your Story settings.

LinkedIn provides three alternatives on this front – when you view a Story, the Story creator will see either:

Your name and headline
Private profile characteristics (title and most recent education institution or company, if applicable)
Private mode (anonymous)

So you do have the option to view LinkedIn Stories anonymously if that better suits.

The Stories creation stream is fairly straight-forward – take a photo/video, add stickers and text, then publish.

As you can see, they’ve even added localized stickers, like ‘G’day’, for the Australian launch.

The expansion, as noted, means that Stories is now available in four regions, with LinkedIn adding another nation every few weeks. Given the amount of users who now have access to the option, you would think that LinkedIn would have enough usage insights to roll it out to all users, but we’ll have to wait and see how the platform decides to introduce the option to more regions.

LinkedIn Stories has already received a lot of criticism, with many people suggesting that it doesn’t fit with the professional communications focus of the platform. But the introduction of Stories does make sense. Broader engagement data shows that Stories is increasingly how the next generation of social media users are communicating, in preference to the traditional News Feed, and as such, leaning into the evolving trend seems like a logical way to go to maximize engagement and interaction.

Really, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it, but there will be a lot of LinkedIn users who do warm to the option, and it could provide a range of new opportunities to connect with your target audiences, and share a different perspective in the app.

Australian users will see LinkedIn Stories appearing in the app sometime soon.

Socialmediatoday.com

SOCIAL

UK teen died after ‘negative effects of online content’: coroner

Published

39 mins ago

October 1, 2022

Entireweb News Bot

Molly Russell was exposed to online material ‘that may have influenced her in a negative way’ – Copyright POOL/AFP/File Philip FONG

A 14-year-old British girl died from an act of self harm while suffering from the “negative effects of online content”, a coroner said Friday in a case that shone a spotlight on social media companies.

Molly Russell was “exposed to material that may have influenced her in a negative way and, in addition, what had started as a depression had become a more serious depressive illness,” Andrew Walker ruled at North London Coroner’s Court.

The teenager “died from an act of self-harm while suffering depression”, he said, but added it would not be “safe” to conclude it was suicide.

Some of the content she viewed was “particularly graphic” and “normalised her condition,” said Walker.

Russell, from Harrow in northwest London, died in November 2017, leading her family to set up a campaign highlighting the dangers of social media.

“There are too many others similarly affected right now,” her father Ian Russell said after the ruling.

“At this point, I just want to say however dark it seems, there is always hope.

“I hope that this will be an important step in bringing about much needed change,” he added.

The week-long hearing became heated when the family’s lawyer, Oliver Sanders, took an Instagram executive to task.

A visibly angry Sanders asked Elizabeth Lagone, the head of health and wellbeing at Meta, Instagram’s parent company, why the platform allowed children to use it when it was “allowing people to put potentially harmful content on it”.

“You are not a parent, you are just a business in America. You have no right to do that. The children who are opening these accounts don’t have the capacity to consent to this,” he said.

Lagone apologised after being shown footage, viewed by Russell, that “violated our policies”.

Of the 16,300 posts Russell saved, shared or liked on Instagram in the six-month period before her death, 2,100 related to depression, self-harm or suicide, the inquest heard.

Children’s charity NSPCC said the ruling “must be a turning point”.

“Tech companies must be held accountable when they don’t make children’s safety a priority,” tweeted the charity.

“This must be a turning point,” it added, stressing that any delay to a government bill dealing with online safety “would be inconceivable to parents”.

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