Multi Level Marketing

Unlike traditional businesses, MLMs form a pyramid-shaped network of distributors who recruit others beneath them, often to the financial detriment of the majority of participants. Though some platforms have rules prohibiting the propagation of pyramid-shaped businesses on their sites, these rules are often under-enforced. Discriminating between genuine entrepreneurial ventures and exploitative pyramid schemes requires significant time researching individual operations, and imposing a (potentially over-broad) set of restrictions in the name of user protection.

However, platforms can minimize their use for this purpose by imposing some simple restrictions on the behavior users are allowed to engage in on the platform. Since MLMs typically spread through private messaging functionality, and recruiters rely heavily on copy-and-paste, restrictions on features that make it easy to rapidly distribute duplicate messages can reduce the potential volume of MLM recruitment that an individual user can generate.