Twitter helps the powerful discover their worst selves and leaves everyone else vulnerable. Facebook brings people together only to subject them to marketing and manipulation. Our social feeds aren’t ready for the 2020 election. None of them are even ready for today. In recent months, they have faced serious scrutiny from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike.

Except one. Is there anything the rest of the internet can learn from LinkedIn?

The site arrived in 2003 as an alternative to job-listing databases and steadily established itself as the professional sector of the social web. Like other networks, LinkedIn was, in its early years, a place to keep up with the people and institutions you had connected with there. In 2010, with the success of Twitter and Facebook’s social feeds as a backdrop, the service carved out its own space for sharing news and life updates. By 2016, when it was purchased by Microsoft, LinkedIn had affirmed its dual identity: It was a networking site for hiring and getting hired, but also a place for “professionals” (i.e. anyone with a LinkedIn account) to share links and thoughts, or what they thought other people might want to read and hear.

Today, a Facebook-style news feed, complete with like, comment and share buttons, is often the first thing users see when they open LinkedIn. The company’s internal editorial team, which writes and curates business content, has a staff of 65. They’re flanked by a massive slate of influencers — business leaders, subject-area experts and marketing gurus — who post regularly, the most popular of whom have millions of followers apiece.

At the end of 2018, the company said that, in one day, “over 2 million posts, videos and articles course through the LinkedIn feed.” Now LinkedIn claims to have more than 645 million users, 180 million of them residing in North America. Last year, it produced more than $5.3 billion in revenue for Microsoft. (For scale, that’s about one-tenth the revenue of Facebook, Inc., about half of Instagram’s and almost twice Twitter’s.)