"I get hives when I come on here": Persisting Through Platform-Delivered Microaggressions on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is central to salaried job search and professional networking. In a career development program for adults seeking upward socioeconomic mobility through middle-wage computing work, we aimed to use LinkedIn to find and develop new social ties. However, we could not use the platform for this purpose. Through a participatory research approach, we formed a research team with diverse positionalities to understand why LinkedIn was difficult to use and how it could be better for our program. We analyzed recorded walk-throughs and confirmed our findings with two years of ethnographic field notes and written reflections. Our findings demonstrate that LinkedIn's embedded algorithms and interface design prioritize users with large networks who can afford a LinkedIn Premium subscription. We argue that such platform-embedded power differentials lead to platform-delivered microaggressions. Non-Premium users and users with small networks must endure microaggressions to participate in the salaried labor market. We argue the politics of LinkedIn as a platform are such that its embedded power differentials are beyond our control and unlikely to change. Therefore, we recommend sociotechnical coping and mitigation strategies for career development programs in lieu of design implications for LinkedIn or similar platforms. We contribute a detailed example of how a technology reinforces pre-existing privilege without users' knowledge.