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🚩 LinkedIn readers can now flag your posts as AI slop — here's what a report really does
Welcome back to TWISM!
Every post in your LinkedIn feed now has a button that lets readers report it as AI slop.
And people are using it. LinkedIn launched the "seems like AI slop" option on Jul 30. Over 1M people used it in the first 2 weeks, and LinkedIn says views on what it classifies as slop have dropped 40% (Social Media Today).
That's aimed at a big share of the feed. Prior research suggested more than 40% of longform LinkedIn posts may be AI-written.
But a single report does less damage than most coverage suggests. The thing that can actually cut your reach sits behind the button, and it changes what you should do about it. 👇
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🔍 What the button actually does
When someone taps it, their report goes to LinkedIn as training data. LinkedIn says reports are "a source of signal that will allow LinkedIn to tune its AI models to better identify slop." It also runs new classifiers that find low-quality content and show less of it in recommendations. And it flags accounts privately, in their own dashboard, when heavy AI use makes their content look inauthentic (TechCrunch).
What one report does: very little to you. LinkedIn says flagging a post does not automatically reduce its distribution: "We look at many signals together, and we've built safeguards to help prevent individual feedback from being used to unfairly target other members" (Engadget). A single report mostly changes what the person who filed it sees in their own feed.
What can cut your reach: the classifiers. They decide what counts as slop across the platform, and it takes a lot of reports to train them.
Keep that in mind when you see the 40% figure quoted. It's LinkedIn's own number for content its systems classify as slop, and it says nothing about what one report does to one post. Plenty of blog coverage reads it as a penalty for getting reported. LinkedIn hasn't said that.
What you'll see: authors now get a notification in their post analytics when a post of theirs has been reported as looking AI-generated. So if it happens to you, you'll know.
LinkedIn's Creator Product Lead, Sam Corrao Clannon, gave the fairest description of the target. He said the system is after "generic, empty, AI-generated content" that lacks "any particular experience, perspective, or insight." That's a much narrower target than every post someone ran through ChatGPT.
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🤖 LinkedIn pulled its own AI writer
The same platform that spent the past two years adding AI writing tools just took one away. Around the time the slop button shipped, LinkedIn removed post enhancement, the feature that rewrote your post for you. You typed a rough idea, and it handed back a finished post.
The volume explains why. With that much of the feed possibly AI-written, LinkedIn had already tuned its algorithm to show fewer posts with common AI tells. It even named the "it's not X, it's Y" sentence as one of them.
When the platform that sold you an AI writer takes it back, I'd read that as the clearest signal you'll get about what the feed rewards now.
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✍ Write it yourself, then let AI edit it
If the feed now favors posts that sound like a person wrote them, the fix is in the order you do things. Here's how to keep AI in your process without posting what readers are reporting:
Draft fast and badly: get the post out of your head in your own words, mistakes included. This is the step AI can't do for you, because your experience is the part LinkedIn says it's looking for
Let AI edit: ask it to cut, tighten and fix what you already wrote. LinkedIn just built that same split into a product
Keep one specific thing: a number, a client situation, a decision you got wrong. Use Clannon's definition as your test. If the post has no particular experience, perspective or insight, it's the kind of post people are reporting
Check your analytics: the report notification shows up there, so you can see whether it's happening to you. If you get one, look at what that post was missing before you write the next one
LinkedIn's own version of this workflow is Post Proofreader, which replaced post enhancement. It suggests edits to a draft you've already written, gives you 3 suggestion options, and shows each change inline as a tracked edit you approve one at a time. It won't write a post from scratch, and it's Premium only. The same update also extended slop reporting to comments, so the rules now cover what you write under other people's posts too (Social Media Today).
If you don't pay for Premium, run the same process in whatever editor you already use. Paste in your rough draft and ask for edits only, with something like: "Tighten this post. Keep my wording and my examples, and don't add anything new."
☝️ The one-sentence version
Readers can now report your LinkedIn posts and comments as AI slop, and while one report won't hurt you, those reports train the classifiers that decide what gets seen. Write the first draft yourself, use AI only to edit it, and keep at least one detail in every post that only you could have written.
Hit reply and tell me: have you been tempted to report a post yet?
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📚 Sources
That's all for today. Thanks for reading. Now…
Go BIG or go home!
~ Josh from "This Week in Social Media"
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