A shadowy plot has been uncovered to slow down the effectiveness of the world’s largest professional social network, LinkedIn. State sponsored provocateurs are suspected of seeding hundreds of math problems onto LinkedIn newsfeeds in an attempt to lower the productivity of the people trying to solve them, most of whom are Westerners.
“This is vintage social-cyber warfare being perpetrated by the Russians – their fingerprints are all over it.” said one US senior security advisor who asked to remain anonymous. Russian President Vladimir Putin has brushed aside the controversy, saying “Russia would never do such a thing – we are a peaceful nation. I like LinkedIn and seeing people’s work anniversary updates, and I’m very proud of my own profile which I look at regularly.”
According to prominent psychologist Dr. Christopher Hedges who specialises in social media induced neuroses, “The math problems are just the latest in an ongoing wave of psychological attacks on the LinkedIn community. A number of observers suspected that the network was being deliberately contaminated as early as 2008 when the first inspirational quotes starting gumming up people’s newsfeeds. We also know from the findings of several studies that inspirational quotes have a depressing effect on a population by reminding people how horrible their own workplace or boss really is.
“But the math problem attacks are more sophisticated. These tests are designed to appear challenging but they are in fact easily solvable. For instance, the average 12 year-old could work out that the answer to 1x1x1x(1+1+0)-(1x1x0) = 2. Ninety percent of people do not get this wrong and correctly solving it hardly makes you a ‘genius’. But many LI members can’t resist providing an answer giving them an inflated sense of intellectual accomplishment. It can also be a desperate cry for peer recognition, approval or acceptance. This is how math problems propagate through the network at the speed they do.
LinkedIn spokesman Chip Fryberg had this say to the media, “We’ve been cooperating with the NSA [National Security Agency] for some time. We knew math problems were being posted via dummy accounts but were powerless to stop people engaging with them. The strength of our network is somewhat ironically also a weakness. At one point we asked Sir Richard Branson to post more regularly – people just love his musings and we thought it might draw the community’s attention away from the problems and they would die out… but even he wasn’t enough.
“All we can do is ask our LinkedIn members to remain vigilant – if you see a suspicious math problem, please just walk away – we can beat this scourge but we must do it together.”