LinkedIn is expanding its free verification system to the entire Internet, allowing external sites and platforms to integrate LinkedIn verification instead of creating their own tool. Adobe is one of the first companies to sign up.
Adobe is integrating LinkedIn verification into its new Content Authenticity app and existing Behance portfolio platform, allowing authors who have passed LinkedIn verification to display the “Verified by LinkedIn” icon on their profiles. If verified authors use Adobe’s digital content verification tools, their credentials will also appear alongside their work whenever it is published on LinkedIn.
“It’s getting cheaper and easier to pretend to be someone you’re not online,” Oscar Rodriguez, LinkedIn’s vice president of trust, told The Verge. “You can also make it look more authentic than ever before. Obviously, authenticity is extremely important to LinkedIn because the platform is based on trust.”
“Online platforms around the world are facing the same issues around inauthenticity, so we believe this collaboration with Adobe will be critical in the sense that LinkedIn members and partners will be able to understand the specific attributes of someone’s identity that have been verified.”
LinkedIn introduced verification in 2023, allowing users to verify specific data, such as their identity, place of work, or educational history, using government-issued IDs or company email addresses. The company says that since then, more than 80 million people have verified themselves using these tools. In addition to Adobe, other early adopters of the advanced verification system include enterprise platforms TrustRadius, G2, and UserTesting.
This week, social network Bluesky introduced its own verification system for “authentic and known” accounts, imitating its competitor Twitter with a blue checkmark design. Twitter verification was once a de facto standard on the web – the company even partnered with Adobe as part of the Content Authenticity Initiative to add attribution to images – before its verification program was scaled back after being bought by Elon Musk and the checkmark became exclusive to paid X Premium subscribers.
