The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd.
If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste.
EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete
On a related note, I declined a job interview when a company wanted to do the interview process via HireVue. Has the Orwellian telescreen feel. The process includes candidate recording interview responses and uploading them for AI to evaluate. HR must not realize that as part of the interview, candidates are also evaluating whether the company is a good place to work at.
> HR must not realize that as part of the interview, candidates are also evaluating whether the company is a good place to work at.
In many fields outside software people with no healthcare, student debt, a mortgage and car payments are screwed. As long as the system keeps the people down, they won't have a choice but to take that job, no matter the Orwellian nature
Hell, inside it, too. I always figured that, although I morally oppose this sort of demeaning treatment, my education and experience in software would at least protect me from it. I thought that right up until my company shut down without warning a couple of years ago and I was out of work. I was a little shocked by how poorly job candidates were treated: hirevue, mandatory contract-to-hire “trial periods”, background checks (the background check I did for the job I have now demanded references for jobs all the way back to 1998!). I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the people who aren’t “in demand”.
Yes, lucky people have more flexibility. The problem is that very few people avoid getting sick or hurt[1], having kids, needing loans, getting laid off, etc. and a healthy society should work for more than 10% of the population.
1. “Keep your health” up is obviously naive to start with but also ask how many people are, say, hurt in car crashes or on the job every year and how cruel your advice would sound to them.
A very high percentage choose to buy a house or car, or have children as part of their life planning when things look fairly stable. When you grow up and have adult responsibilities, the youthful feeling of invulnerability starts to fade.
Oh, HR does and laughs at the thought. But we live in a political system where corporations have seemingly unalienable rights above their workers. “Want to afford things? Then succumb to the dictates of corporate America or else.” All the while, these same corporations benefit from unprecedented federal deficit spending at the cost of the individual citizens.
It's fine and dandy for people in tech but if you're a single parent with a narrow set of skills who's struggling and been applying for jobs for over a month then you're going to take the offer. And then you're not going to have much time to continue job searching.
The better questions is do you want to help your neighbours and people in your community who are in such a situation, or do you just say "It's your problem" and turn a blind eye.
What kind of world do you want to live in?
Keep in mind you're only one serious medial disaster (massive car crash, cancer, etc.) away from bankruptcy, so it would be extremely quick for the tables to turn.
Do some reading into people who were steadfastly against universal healthcare until they had a major medical emergency in their family. It's funny how people need a very personal experience of being on the s--t end of the stick before they want to change how the stick works.
This is entirely true. I’d much rather pay 5% more in taxes and have Medicare for all rather than the current system (although Canada/rest of the commonwealth actually spend less per capita with a longer life expectancy), where healthcare pricing is almost entirely opaque. So cool you work at your favorite FANG making 200k/yr + 50k in RSU, but what happens when you get cancer in 2 yrs and they lay you off? Maybe you get unemployment for a year? Then you have to apply for Medicaid and how you don’t die while also losing your house. Your partner/spouse may also lose your healthcare coverage.
Having kids when you're not ready for them and getting cancer or into a car crash are two very different things, I hope you can see that.
And if people change their opinions when they end up on the opposite side of the situation, those opinions probably weren't worth much to begin with and will likely change again once things turn around.
I’m thinking that the best way to help those sorts of people is, when the opportunity exists for one, to choose employers that don’t abuse their potential staff. Not everyone has that choice, of course, but those that do should take it and do everything else possible to disadvantage such abusive organizations.
That’s how I choose to help.
If everyone with a skilled trade adopts that sort of approach and suggests that others do the same, these kinds of places will eventually go away and their abusive practices with them.
Companies can only offer benefits in proportion to their own finances and employees. A company with 5000 employees has much less bargaining power with an insurance company than a 15000 employee business. There’s no need to make moral judgements about the desire of the smaller company to explain why their employees have worse insurance than their smaller size. Now, mind you, we’re all supposed to be staunch capitalists here who prefer a large economy made up of many small, efficient businesses.
It’s not always a clear-cut this is better than that choice. Even if you were to have all of the information up front. Which you will not.
They made a bad decision in the heat of passion, and didn't have a safety net to let them stand back up?
Fuck'em. Who wants those kinds of people in our society?
</angry sarcasm>
To be slightly less angry and sarcastic - such a person has typically fallen through the cracks, and is vulnerable to being shoved into a "hold multiple jobs so you can afford your basic needs" position.
Yes, we should be protecting these kinds of people. Having to work more than 40 hours a week to meet your basic needs is barbaric; it reflects poorly on us as a society.
No everyone has the same experiences, opportunities, or blessings that would lead to the set of circumstances that make these decisions easier for others. Therefore, we should all be concerned when a system makes people in different, unchosen circumstances from us suffer more or go through more difficulty. Without this compassion for others we are no better than beasts roaming the lands looking for mates and territory.
Or what if your significant other was the one working while you were a stay at home parent taking care of N children only for them to die in an accident at a young age. What then?
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
It may be said that of this hard lot no one has any reason to complain, because it befalls those only who are outstripped by others, from inferiority of energy or of prudence. This, even were it true, would be a very small alleviation of the evil. If some Nero or Domitian were to require a hundred persons to run a race for their lives, on condition that the fifty or twenty who came in hindmost should be put to death, it would not be any diminution of the injustice that the strongest or nimblest would, except through some untoward accident, be certain to escape. The misery and the crime would be that any were put to death at all. So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements.
This. Building out the social net with things like UBI and universal medical benefits makes it easier to hire people for companies and easier to work for a wider range of companies as individual citizens.
There are entire industries insulated enough for illegal HR practices to prevail. “Other places to work” line of reasoning is tone deaf and functionally abusive.
I’m not sure how privately holding the opinion “anyone who can choose non-abusive employers should choose them over abusive ones” is itself “functionally abusive”.
It’s abusive when it’s used as it was here to imply that it’s the worker’s fault for accepting bad working conditions, as if there aren’t many well documented reasons why that’s hard for most people.
Then what was the point of replying to a comment about bad working conditions to say people should switch jobs? The entire discussion was about how it’s getting harder to avoid certain practices. Do you really think most people with bad working environments haven’t considered the option?
I've also laughed at companies trying to pull this thing, but I also realize that this is a huge privilege. There is really only in tech that the tables are somewhat flipped, and applicants can afford to give HR bullies the middle finger.
Those numbers aren’t really telling you the full story: unemployment is relatively low but pay scales have lagged far behind — someone whose corporation gets rid of them after they turn 50[1] and ends up working as an Uber driver is technically still employed but in reality they have very limited ability to negotiate pay or working conditions.
1. I was recently talking with an older relative who had multiple friends experience things like being reassigned to offices which required much longer commutes when they were starting to approach retirement age, despite no change in their work or at the business at the location they’d worked for the previous 2-3 decades. Said relative was very happy to have a union which prevents abuse like that.
Yes, and millions of people working multiple jobs are considered to be living below the poverty line. America is the only developed country that has the class of "working class poor"
More crap jobs is not a good thing, and nobody should want that.
> applicants can afford to give HR bullies the middle finger.
Probably depends a lot on your location though unless you are aiming for companies that allow remote. Midwest Ohio vs. San Francisco. I feel like since the job market is so much larger, SF would be much more flexible when being picky about jobs than other places.
I wonder if we already have products where the AI does the entire first-stage candidate selection based on detailed data profiles on those who've applied, and HR only receives the CV's of people that passed the AI filter.
> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste.
Background reports like these, along with drug testing for office jobs that don't deal with heavy machinery, are indicative of companies that have unhealthy views of the employer-employee relationship, especially in a country with at-will employment. Steer clear of them.
Often the drug-testing things are related to contracts with either the (US Federal) government or contracts with companies that have contracts with the (US Federal)government, such as O&G, Healthcare and Banking.
That is to say: Sometimes companies don't have much choice in some of this.
EDIT: I just remembered that I was talking to my corporate attorney's office recently (medium-size-law), and they say that if any applicant's facebook page over spring-break was too salacious (for example), they wouldn't be willing to hire them, because they didn't want the client to think that they were not 'conservative and judicious and considered' (when I say 'conservative' here, it has nothing to do with left-/right- wing politics in the US)
Employees in a client-facing role have the potential to harm a company badly. Companies are cautious. Now, I believe this twitter thing in the OP is ridiculous, and their faulty use of NLP is beyond atrocious, I think that it is fair for employers to be concerned about linking their reputation to that of "proven" rogues, renegades (I can't even spell renegade, George), party-animals, and revolutionaries.
Not at all. I understand that drug testing is required due to contractual obligations and things like security clearances. However, I choose not to apply to such jobs because what I do on my own time doesn't need scrutiny from my employer. I've heard from colleagues of companies in the consumer app space sometimes requiring drug tests for their engineering and non-engineering roles, which is more of what I'm addressing. There just isn't need for that beyond an employer or HR department not liking the idea of someone smoking a joint on the weekends.
People who choose to allow their public online presence to be unprofessional are allowed to be scrutinized by those who care about those things. However, if your employer is hiring companies that use bots to friend your private profiles and mine content from them, that's an overstep in my opinion. Wanting a dossier on an applicant's likes, opinions and a sentiment analysis on their posts is kind of absurd in my opinion.
i agree with the intent, but i don't agree with the solution.
for the same reason that i object to the public ostracising companies because one of their employees dared to have a personal opinion that is different from theirs.
as long as an employee is not using the company as a vehicle for their personal agenda, its not fair to demand that the company distance themselves from that employee.
in the same vein i expect that companies do not screen candidates for their private opinions.
this kind of screening only leads to a defacto restriction on the freedom of speech.
when sharing my opinion restricts my ability to get a job then i have no freedom of speech.
Looks like Hire Right (https://www.hireright.com/) uses this. And a lot of the FANG tier companies use Hire Right. That'd a exclude a lot of the tech companies.
This has to be arm's-length plausible deniability for rejecting applicants on illegal criteria, right? Doesn't Facebook have better data and better data scientists than its partners do?
HireRight almost failed my background check because I got the month wrong on my graduation from high school. I legitimately don't understand why a background check has to be this in-depth.
Edit: actually I think it was elementary school. Even worse.
I often get questions about background checks because I have a painfully common American name and there's a few people who share this name that have been convicted of some pretty serious crimes.
On the one hand I'm not sure what this says about the veracity of background checks performed at the time, on the other hand I'm glad one job bothered to bring this up and ask "This isn't you is it?"
I ended up petitioning the state of California (a state I'd never even visited up to that point) and providing some key information to receive a letter from the state attorney stating "This isn't the dvtrn you're looking for".
The company wouldn't tell me who the background check provider was so I could try setting the record straight, and I ended up taking another job entirely in the end but it was NOT a fun experience and it's filled me with all kinds of anxiety to wonder "how many jobs and housing opportunities have I just missed out on because a background checker thought I was a felon?"
similar here. got laid off with severance in month x. company reported employing ending month x+2, my resume says I started a new job month x+1. HR calls me in a disdained huff "Sorry Mr. Effect, but we don't handle prevarications lightly."
wait, since when was it not allowed to have two jobs at once? at worst this should have raised a question on what you did at the old company during that last month.
Just to add, when I was interviewing at my current company (FANG), hireright has the nerve to call my THEN employer and try to verify my salary information!
I went through a HireRight background check recently and I didn’t see anything related to social media? Maybe it’s something the company needs to explicitly ask for?
It's basically an algorithmic filter for wokism. A lot of innovative people tend to be unswayed by our strange moral fads. Seems like talent is being left on the table. Good news for startups.
Not really “for wokism” - some of the tweets captured are “woke” but still flagged for the language used. As one reply pointed out “fuck racism” would get flagged. It seems like it’s more just scanning for expressions of opinion, good or bad. “I like alcohol” - flagged bad. “I love charity” - flagged good. So these can be used by employers to determine “culture fit” which (opinion here) will probably largely be used, consciously or unconsciously, to enforce a homogeneous work force (racially, sexually, politically).
Hmmm... Looks like it is time for me to make a tweet storm using template “I love {equality|charity|people|community|...}” to increase my chances on future interviews.
I am curious if people here think there is a different standard for high profile hires. This happens all the time in the entertainment industry. There are plenty of examples of PR disasters that occur when someone's old offensive tweets are resurfaced. Knowing about those tweets beforehand allows a company to either advise that the tweets are deleted or that the potential for future PR problems means someone else should be hired.
And sports too! Josh Hader from the Brewers and Kyler Murray from the Cardinals are the first ones to mind. It'd be interesting to see how much vetting goes into this before the draft and how much of a hard no certain things are
>The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd.
It's not about "workplace performance", it's more about "can PC nuts target our company for hiring this person because of something this person said/liked? Let's cover our asses like cowards and not hire them if so".
That's an interesting way of spelling "could we accidentally hire a decent person who would blow the whistle on our shitty politics and toxic culture? Let's cover our asses like cowards and not hire them if so"
I'm curious about something, would most of the people who are aghast at this be as aghast at it if this had flagged someone who was racist, sexist, transphobic, or homophobic?
I would be, but I wonder if I'm in the minority or not.
This pilfering of your digital history is on the order of what's needed to get a security clearance - where it's at least somewhat justified. There is no case where I can see this being justified for normal employment.
People who have bad opinions should not of course have jobs. They should die on the streets, as untouchables...
Of course this holds as long as "the good side" has the power to make companies fire people for their tweets. If and when conservatives get this power (like e.g. they did in the Hoover or McCarthy era), this practice would be wrong again, and it should all be about "freedom of speech" and right to work, etc.
On the other hand, if said views effect their ability to work cohesively in a professional environment, having someone like that in your office opens you up to significant liability.
It's very easy to make a case that workplace discrimination happened, or that a hostile work environment was fostered, when there are public discriminatory tweets by the perpetrator that corroborate with the incidents. It's equally difficult to claim ignorance as an employer when they are, again, public.
"Bad opinions" is a pretty remarkable simplification of the concept of someone that doesn't think you're fully human based on the color of your skin or your sexuality.
Would you want to work with someone that didn't think you should be allowed to exist?
>"Bad opinions" is a pretty remarkable simplification of the concept of someone that doesn't think you're fully human based on the color of your skin or your sexuality.
And "someone that doesn't think you're fully human based on the color of your skin or your sexuality" is a pretty remarkable simplification of the concept that someone might have religious, moral, philosophical, practical, political, or other considerations about certain behaviours -- in an era when all nuance is often lost and they are bagged as bigots...
>Would you want to work with someone that didn't think you should be allowed to exist?
First, why would you use a huge strawman as an argument?
There are tons of ways to think X group should do something different, or do or not do something, or that they're not saints, or that they go about Y in the wrong way, without thinking "they should not be allowed to exist". But still people are called out for all kinds of tame stuff (e.g. saying only biological women should compete in women's sports, for example), called out to be fired, etc.
Second, yes, I might not want to work with people who don't think I should exist, but I also don't want to have them fired for not wanting me to exist.
There are many coworkers I had throughout my career I myself wished didn't existed (idiotic bosses), but I wouldn't want to get their fired, cause them pain etc.
And if they wish me not to exist, that's their thing. Even if they show it, e.g. with passive aggressiveness, etc (which happens all too often in the workplace just because two people don't like each other, compete for the same position, have different styles, one is jealous of the other, etc. - race/sex etc is hardly the most common cause of this).
Point being, I'm not some God to dictate who deserves to have work or not. Nor do their families, kids, etc deserve to suffer because I am "hurt" of their opinions. And even less so, their personal opinions, outside of work.
If they behave unprofessionally at work to me or anyone else, sure, have them fired.
Pretty much. Most people see themselves as the protagonist in their personal narrative. Projection of belief onto others tends to make them view you as an antagonist in their same narrative. It's also one of the many personal traits that create the archetype of an "asshole" in my narrative.
People who try and evangelize their religious beliefs for example can be bigots who think they're righteous. By the same token, atheists who evangelize their lack of beliefs can be bigots who think they're righteous. Either way, they're assholes that I don't want to work with.
> And "someone that doesn't think you're fully human based on the color of your skin or your sexuality" is a pretty remarkable simplification of the concept that someone might have religious, moral, philosophical, practical, political, or other considerations about certain behaviours -- in an era when all nuance is often lost and they are bagged as bigots...
There were plenty of claimed religious justifications for businesses who wanted to discriminate against mixed race couples, but in the end, that didn't really matter. There is no functional difference between bigotry with "nuance" and bigotry itself.
>There were plenty of claimed religious justifications for businesses who wanted to discriminate against mixed race couples, but in the end, that didn't really matter. There is no functional difference between bigotry with "nuance" and bigotry itself.
Sure, there's "no functional difference between bigotry with "nuance" and bigotry itself". But here the word bigotry is used twice in a weaselly way, making it a circular argument, that assumes what it should instead prove.
There's, however, a functional difference between bigotry and a nuanced position that touches on sex/race/etc relations - which was my point.
Except if nobody can have a position in sex/race/etc matters that goes against what an enlightened minority holds, except if they are bigots. Even if there are members of said sex, race, etc agree with the person -- and the "enlightened minority" is often a self-appointed hodgepodge of noise-making people.
Clarifying a little what I meant by my last paragraph, as it was hastily written - and also had a few typos:
My point is that there's a functional difference between bigotry and a nuanced position that touches on sex/race/etc relations - and that the latter does exist, and is often called out unfairly.
Now, one might believe that such a nuanced position is impossible to exist (without being bigotry).
That is, one might believe that nobody can have a stance on a matter concerning sex/race/etc that goes against what some enlightened minority holds, without being a bigot.
I try to point that this is wrong, via reduction ad absurdum.
And my first argument is: there are opinions called out as bigotry which some of the members of the group they reference also hold (e.g. saying something about group X which some X also believe, and being called a bigot about it).
If one doesn't believe that those opinions are nuanced, and not necessarily bigotry, then they should also accuse those members of group X as bigoted against themselves - which is absurd.
My second argument is: why would one believe that an accusation of bigotry can't be off? Especially since any random person/mob can make such accusations, for whatever purposes, and with whatever faulty reasoning -- and not only some ultimate arbiters of truth.
I thought this line "Even if there are members of said sex, race, etc agree with the person -- and the "enlightened minority" is often a self-appointed hodgepodge of noise-making people." was rather brilliant.
I'm from Canada and this opinion seems extreme and would result in the opposite effect.
Not allowing someone to work would make them open their own business. They would hire like minded people. They would push some mainstream businesses into bankrupcy.
Sounds like a recipe for more racism. Like you are doubling down.
In Canada we would work with the person and tell people to leave your opinions at home. Magically opinions change quickly when you get to know one another. It is hard to hold on to such views when the reality is so different.
I do work with people who don't think I should be allowed to exist. But they're required to be polite to me at work, and to use my pronouns, and as long as they do that no lines have been crossed.
This comment feels remarkably uncharitable and unkind. Many of us are perfectly happy to refer to people by their chosen pronouns without making fun of them behind their backs. Hopefully the poster you were replying to works in an office where people are not as childish and inconsiderate as you assume they would be.
Pretty much none of the people I work with would consider this ridicule-worthy.
People are aware it's not usual to have different pronouns so the reason they'd make this request must be important to them. Probably more important than it is for you to use regular pronouns.
So if it's important, why ridicule them?
(Of course, if you have evidence that they're doing it on a whim or for frivolous reasons, then sure, you can make fun of them _for being frivolous_.)
EDIT: I've watched the video you've linked to. I think it's important to understand those are comedians doing an entertainment show. They're obviously not seriously intelectually engaging the issue. And Segura even says he's fine with using people's prefered pronouns.
Can you find an article or video about these recently manufactured pronouns that has a majority of comments that are supportive? Because I certainly can't. As I said to the other responder - even the gays are against it AFAICT since articles I've found on places like "pink news" have shown gay people mocking them as well.
I find that what people say to your face at work is vastly different from what they'll say outside of work or when they really feel comfortable...anonymously online.
> an article or video about these recently manufactured pronouns that has a majority of comments that are supportive
I think that's the wrong measure for this.
Also, there's a chance we're talking past each other - in a separate reply you mentioned changing the pronoun based on the other person's mood. I think that's an extreme case, particularly because it's impractical (which is the source of a lot of these jokes).
Separately, imagine one of your friends comes to you and says 'wayneftw, I have done some serious thinking and I disagree with how society views my gender. I know it's an uncommon request, but this is important to me: I would like you to use these pronouns when referring to me."
So... You're on the side of people that want to be allowed to make fun of people that care deeply about being acknowledged as a chosen identity? You find this position defensible somehow?
Oh absolutely. The word police can fucking suck my big one hard. I'll call you "he" or "she" and you can pick one. I'm not changing how I reference you based on your mood and I'm not using any other recently manufactured pronouns ever.
The vast majority of Americans are on my side here. Look around at comments on articles and videos about fake pronouns. Even the majority of gays are against it. It's absolutely 100% a fucking laughing stock of a subject. If you can't see that, then you're blind.
> For instance, a doctor who doesn't want to perform a sex change operation or administer hormones to young children, because they think it is harmful to them, would be considered transphobic by many advocates.
You are leaving out the important bit: The justification. The problem isn't a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful, the problem is a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful against established science with no science to back up their own position--i.e., where the actual motivation for the refusal is their personal dislike of giving trans people the opportunity to transition according to their own wishes rather than genuine concern for the patient.
> The justification. The problem isn't a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful, the problem is a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful against established science with no science to back up their own position
Well, I don't think we are going to solve this in the comments section, but my impression is that is not true. Trans-friendly doctors who have a long history of working in the field and helping suffering individuals transition have been accused of being transphobic, while advocates for aggressive medical treatment openly admit they don't have scientific evidence backing their treatments (use of puberty blockers in young children, for instance, is off-label and I'm unaware of any studies done with control groups that compare therapy vs drugs for treating this in children). E.g. https://www.thecut.com/2016/02/fight-over-trans-kids-got-a-r...
Where this will eventually land in terms of the science isn't clear to me but what is clear is that the use of the term "transphobe" has increased dramatically. I've also seen it applied to those who state they wouldn't be interested in dating or having sex with a transitioned person, which is far from wishing them to not be human or not exist.
I think it's very reasonable to want to avoid people who are openly racist or problematic in the workplace but expanding definitions of "phobic" and "ism" is concerning and I'd wonder how such algorithmic tools would judge where the lines are.
Right, there's no objective morality, any action anyone takes is their right because freedom. It's equally bad when anyone says anything bad because... reasons.
No, there's not. The universe doesn't care about morals. Societies build their morality. It changes in time and place. If you lived in 1840s South you'd statistically be a racist. If you lived in a tribe you'd have their morality.
>any action anyone takes is their right because freedom
If there's no morality, then any action anyone takes is neither right, nor wrong.
But for a given morality (e.g. 2020 US morality) an action can be right or wrong, or something in between (as morality is complicated, not black and white -- e.g. a murder of someone to steal them, or a murder of a someone who tried to rape you is not equally bad, even though it's equally murder).
>It's equally bad when anyone says anything bad because... reasons.
I don't think holding racist, homophobic, or sexist views would be considered "bad opinions". They are likely going to limit your effectiveness in the workplace, so yeah seems fine to screen for that.
The US had been full of racisst, homophobic, and sexist people much more in the past and it didn't hurt their "effectiveness in the workplace", to the point that the US was the #1 economy in the world. So, maybe personal opinions of that nature are not related to being a good developer or a good car mechanic or hair dresser.
Second, what's a offensive (e.g. homophobic, sexist, etc) is quite an arbitrary thing these days, with all kinds of things that would perfectly fine for a leftist Democrat to say in 1990 or 2000 or 2010 being considered as such in 2020, and things getting weirder by the minute.
If keeping racists around was so good for business, then business culture would not have drastically changed in the last 50 or 60 years.
As far as US being #1 economy, that generally happens when the rest of the developed world is in rubble (post WWII). Men being sexist and racist was not necessarily a contributor.
Another trend was more people smoked cigarettes. Do you thinking smoking cigarettes means a more effective business?
>If keeping racists around was so good for business
Nobody said it was "good". What was said, to quote, is: "So, maybe personal opinions of that nature are not related to being a good developer or a good car mechanic or hair dresser" -- in other words, that it was not really a contributor (pro or con).
>Another trend was more people smoked cigarettes. Do you thinking smoking cigarettes means a more effective business?
No, but I do think whether an employee smoked or not said nothing about how good they are at their job.
> it didn't hurt their "effectiveness in the workplace"
You can't know that. The fact businesses almost universally moved to eliminate these tendencies speaks to some evidence that it was to their detriment.
And as far as I know, smokers are not being penalized in the work place, despite taking more breaks than non smokers.
I don't think the hypothetical people you refer to would be against flagging people for bigoted behavior/speech. In fact, I personally don't see an issue with manually doing a Twitter advanced search to see if someone – especially for a public-facing role – has tweeted outright slurs; I specify "manually" to insinuate that context is important when assessing this.
I think people's main issues with this specific software/practice are:
1. It evaluates Liked tweets – if you believe tweets to have too little context to be accurate signals of how a potential employee would behave, liking a tweet contains even less context.
2. Any service that provides data via widescale scraping and auto classifying can and will eventually be reduced to an "authoritative" score.
> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company.
You might not even know --- and it could extend beyond hiring. Didn't get promoted? Maybe it's because someond keyword matched you for "toxic". The only real way to safeguard yourself is to keep your identity as small and bland as possible, and that's no way to live.
You're absolutely right. Background checks for employment purposes are covered under FCRA (Fair Credit Reporting Act) and a myriad of other laws at various levels. Complying with these laws is not trivial, but the onus is on the employer to handle compliance if they are using data sources like this.
I work at a background check startup that puts a focus on fairness and compliance.
> You know it's still well within the range of possibility to live a healthy, fully actualized life without a named online presence, right?
It's possible, sure. But why should anyone have to hide like that? It's the principle of the thing: an ordinary person shouldn't fear for his livelihood just because he exercises his right to speak in public.
Because no one would hire you because you don't seem perfect. Employers are looking for perfect and the real you isn't perfect. No one is. Some people do seem perfect but they only show you a piece. You want the world to accept all of you and the world is pretending to be something else.
Yes. You should have multiple online personas. I certainly do. I have accounts for video game stuff. Accounts for warhammer miniature painting. A "general bullshit" persona. And a professional persona. The professional one should be squeaky clean.
If someone is posting publicly that women are intellectually inferior and shouldn't be allowed to work professional jobs, you think this should have no effect on their job?
You think they are going to leave those beliefs at the door when they go to work? You think women who work for this person are going to be evaluated fairly?
If someone does something in their personal life that shows they would be unable to do their job, it is entirely reasonable to have that affect their employment.
First I'd want to be sure someone was actually "posting publicly that women are intellectually inferior and shouldn't be allowed to work professional jobs".
Sometimes people post something completely different and it gets twisted into something like that that's obviously offensive but isn't what they said.
In much the same way this report twists the meaning of every tweet.
If the company genuinely cares about not hiring people like that then they will read up on the job candidate before interviewing them. Passing this off to a 3rd party service basically just shows that the company doesn't really care about knowing any of the people they are hiring.
So you want to force this person to work for themselves and be responsible for hiring. Maybe putting your company out of business and ensuring his viewpoint continues.
I think you give the person a chance and use training if a problem exists.
> If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company.
For sure. But their customers are equally suspect. If anyone's prospective or current employer is actually paying for and using this tool, that's a big red flag in my opinion.
At the least I think it betrays very poor judgement.
Oooooooh I’ve been meaning to write a similar tool but you already did it so that’s perfect! Quick question: is it possible to specify a date to delete tweets before or do I need to calculate the number of days? Also what happens if the number of tweets is greater than 3200?
Some great people I know use twitter regularly but is that safe? How can someone handle that atrocious interface which doesn't work 50% of the time outside of the app? Can you even be real on twitter without getting lynched by someone?
Maybe someone should make social media where promotion, influencers, marketing companies, etc are banned or not allowed.
They're definitely using some form of sentiment analysis, but IMO these are exactly the kind of results you'd get after setting a programmer, with little to no actual data science background, loose to train his nets on data with a limited or absent intuitive understanding of bias from training data. And what's worse is that in their business false flags probably aren't even considered. It's an extra wide supercharged net.
E.G the "BIG DICK ENERGY" post being flagged as bigotry and sexism, no doubt they trained on limited data of hand curated "questionable posts" and I wouldn't be surprised if they used a source like 4chan and just automatically assigned negative labels to the vast majority of posts.
The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?
I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.
Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what exactly a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist.
In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ?
Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...
Right, it's probably inappropriate to use this term at this specific place in my argument.
However, in what is probably not just a coincidence, the global issue this is only one facet of is about the information asymmetry between citizens and corporations...
AWS and Azure both have services for this now. Tweet sentiment analysis is like the first getting started tutorial you land on when you hit both of their docs.
This is exactly the kind of hysteria that will tear society apart.
The types of jokes a person shares and enjoys outside of the office by and large are not a reflection of character, even when they are racist, sexist, or some other -ist. In fact that's the very reason that they are funny, because they are counter to norms. There's nothing immature or childish about this if you're not oversocialized.
Believe it or not, it's possible to be a competent programmer and decent human being while occasionally indulging in an off color joke. Humor is a form of release. You've lived a sheltered life if you're unaware of how perfectly normal and nearly ubiquitous so called "locker room talk" is.
Your post is a perfect example of a dangerous overreaction. Suddenly liking the wrong post makes me an "incel" and keeps me from contributing to society. Isn't that a little crazy?
> The types of jokes a person shares and enjoys outside of the office by and large are not a reflection of character, even when they are racist, sexist, or some other -ist.
If most of your social media posts are you liking racist, sexist or some other ist content, I will avoid you. Who wouldn't?
This is a toddler level correlation/causation conflation and misunderstanding of psychological motivations and a thorough lack of understanding of humor. To assign so much meaning to a like is to presume to understand its meaning. But what if the like itself is ironic, sarcastic, or merely a bookmark? This kind of literalist interpretation is laughable, and will surely be looked upon in the future as a cringe-worthy kind of scientism that bloodletting and "alignment of the four humors" is now.
Please read my comment again. One like from your personal Twitter account on a nazi post or conspiracy theory meme means nothing. 90% likes on such content categories from your personal account? That means a lot about you.
I understand your comment just fine the first time I read it. It's not the first time that someone's come up with such a hare-brained idea, and it's certainly not the last. If you are presuming that an account "liking" a post means that 1) the account is genuine reflection of what a person believes deep down and 2) that they are using the "like" action to indicate that they agree with the post, then you're making a lot of assumptions that are rarely true. In fact, they're so rarely true that at a certain point, Facebook added reactions because the "like" button was so noisy!
The idea one can judge what someone thinks based on context-free metadata without actually talking to them, reading what they've written, or judging what they've done is hilarious. It's so fundamentally at odds with how human beings work and think (specifically with respect to satire[0] and irony) that it beggars belief. If Charlie Chaplin were alive today and acting out one of his greatest satires[1] on Twitter, a certain well known German dictator would be part of the punchline. But so too would be you, for taking it at face value.
What if I'm using that account to bookmark posts for my research for a book on neo Nazi atrocities? Your argument is absurd. You cannot know any meaning from any number of likes. That's the absurd part. That you think that at some number, likes become meaningful in a way you can understand. That's simply not the case. We can't even know what authors of classical books were thinking, people like Plato and Aristotle with certainty, people that left us with works of thousands of words. But you pretend to be the genius who can derive meaning from a hundred tweets? The absurdity and arrogance on display here is unbelievable.
That's some pretty high level stuff. I imagined their machine learning is a large cubicle filled room of humanoid machines manually sifting through people's profiles.
Oy. Similarly, I'm mystified with the CIA's and NSA's fascination with mandatory recurring polygraph tests. It's pretty well known the whole area is flawed bullshit. It doesn't measure anything remotely related to "truth".
<b>Edit:</b> I know we aren't supposed to discuss downvotes here, but the activity on this comment and my replies are very interesting. It's curious why discussion on this topic is so controversial. Why wouldn't the UK want it's own foreign policy distinct from the US policy? Downvotes welcome. I give zero shits about my HN "karma score".
I think the polygraph is really just an additional tool to aid the main goal, which is to interrogate the participant. To this end the polygraph is a useful tool as it provides added discomfort, which can help the interrogator get answers from the participant.
while I'm sure plenty of people in law enforcement haven't 'gotten the memo' that polygraphs don't actually work, I suspect in many cases they do them anyways exactly for the reason you describe.
Reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from The Wire, Bunk using his bag of tricks to get someone to talk. Whole thing is hilarious, but the lie detector stuff starts here:
Depends, I guess, on what they do with it. Indicators of stress could be a "good thing" in a lot of cases. It might show maturity and broad thinking versus deception. I'm a bit biased in thinking they probably bias towards loyalty and party line vs the real story. In any case, it probably excludes a lot of real talent that won't put up with the bullshit. They are inadvertently creating a very narrow culture that hurts their effectiveness.
It's pretty well known that it is flawed bullshit when applied a small number of times to a small number of people that you have limited information where you are trying to find out the truth about something very specific.
Applied repeatedly over a long time to a large group of people that you have extensive information on where you are aren't looking for information about some specific thing, by an agency with extensive experience in extracting meaningful signals from noisy sources...I would not be at all surprised if they can get something actually valid from it.
They don’t. Unless you count giving a Lebanese Hizballah illegal a security clearance, which might have been due to something other than the polygraph but is hard to reconcile with any background check actually being performed.
Polygraphs could work as advertised for 99.99% of people being processed for security clearance and still be useless, because their effectiveness against people who take the job with the intention of leaking, selling, or otherwise inappropriately handling classified information is nil. The US government has spent tons of money on polygraph research and administration over the last century despite knowing from the beginning that it was a fraud, and has never even once prevented an act of espionage with one.
Yeah. It's pretty interesting that popular culture like Dateline, 20/20, Forensic Files, etc, never digs into things like "talk to my lawyer", polygraphs or drug dogs. They tow the line of "cooperate with the cops or you're guilty". They regularly position this sort of thing as an admission of guilt.
I think pop culture is actually culpable here. It leads to reinforcing lay people's belief in these techniques, and especially in the US with the jury system, kay people tend to have more influence on the punishment.
AFAIK the standard script for polygraph tests is for the interrogator to say there's a "trigger", regardless of whether there's actually a statistically significant change in the polygraph output. The idea is convince the participant that they know they're lying and push them to incriminate themselves.
IMO discussion forums should show the user comments that they'd likely agree with instead of comments that some majority-of-the-moment agrees with.
Sorting comments on a majority average is such a dumb metric. The Internet would be a better place if forum discussions more closely modeled real life, where we simply don't have disagreeable opinions constantly shoved in our face because we don't hang around with those people who have them.
One simple way I'd do it: If I upvoted someone in the past, I'd give their comments and upvotes more weight. I'd also give people a way to visit the other side and break free of their bubble if they wanted to.
Insightful, thank you. It's a bit theoritcal, but I'd like a way for replies to be sorted by merit versus controversy or popularity. I'm not adverse to the idea that I'm wrong.
So the company requesting the background check for a job get's to decide what they'd like included. Which means they believe knowing what you tweet is important. Probably due to all the public flogging of companies where someone was found to have posted "inappropriate" things (or donated to an "inappropriate" candidate, etc.). Where inappropriate is defined as whatever the group of people doing the flogging think shouldn't be done so you get a rather large pool once you combine the definitions from all groups.
I don't even know what to say about this. I'm speechless.
This is so, so, so, so, stupid, yet it's presumably being used to curtail some people's job opportunities in a society where you basically need to be employed by a corporation to be a first-class citizen.
There need to be laws against arbitrary background checks. If only our government had a real interest in protecting its citizens.
There need to be laws against background checks in their entirety. People who have supposedly paid their penitence for their crimes are still punished up to 7 years after the fact, or longer, and cannot obtain meaningful employment due to it, and are thus stuck committing crimes to survive. Absolutely abhorrent.
To change this, I think you need to change the culture first. Our culture thinks that once you commit even the tiniest of crimes, your life is no longer worth anything. That's why we do not rehabilitate people and have such long prison terms. Until we fix our culture, I don't think we can get traction on this problem. As long as we think of someone who smoked a joint as not human, deserving not only to be thrown in jail but also to be raped (yes this is part of our culture and there are plenty examples of it) we are not going to fix the issue of denying people jobs for something that did 50 years ago. Culture matters and when it comes to punishment and justice, our society is beyond sick. To me, it's amazing it still stands and hasn't collapsed yet due to the complete and utter lack of thought or motivation towards justice, let alone rehabilitation.
Anyone who appreciates freedom shouldn't lend so much as a thought to a company that tries to do something like this. Get my credit score, call my last employer, do a criminal background check, whatever. But if you scour the internet for any possible kindergarten wrongdoing I've made, goodbye. I'd rather live in a van down by the river.
Get used to it... this is the world we (the tech community) helped, even pushed, to create.
I ask myself, would a FAANG company hire someone who doesn't actively tweet? Somehow, I doubt it.
It is increasingly impossible to live in the modern world without using the internet. Try buying something these days; many of the brick-and-mortar stores are disappearing. Try getting a job without using online services. Try buying a home or even renting an apartment without online services. The cost benefits of leveraging the internet for most operations (help-desk, ordering, even viewing) grossly outweigh the expense of having people perform such duties. The digitization of life is only going to grow, IMO.
We, the people, are being (operationally) forced to use the internet for more and more aspects of post-industrial life.
For now, our Orwellian dystopia persuades us to use the system. As the "free market" pushes us more and more in the direction of online-only services, AI-driven chat bots and the like, we will reach a point where you must be online to get nearly anything done.
Treat every activity you perform on the internet as if it will last forever. Because it will. And people can judge you for it now and forever; even after you've passed on.
Most of us have nothing to hide; but this perspective is based on our past experiences. We have nothing to hide if the old rules apply. But these are new rules. I can laugh at an off-color joke in the closeness of friends. Do the same online (via a like, re-tweet, share, whatever) and it becomes part of the permanent BigBrother data store... discover-able, query-able, judge-able forever.
You do realise Twitter is a massive bubble right? Actively hiring from that pool only will cause the tech industry to be far more homogeneous in thinking - something it desperately needs to get away from.
Well take a cue from the drug trafficking industry. The drug cartels dont hire people who use the product because those people would be unproductive. Same goes for social media. Only difference here is that the companies dont actively screen the people using the product.
Ok, fair enough, but try and extend the pattern. What if the technical candidates don't have a Facebook account, a twitter account, a github account, or any other active online presence? Do you think such resume's will jump to the top of the decision pile? I highly doubt it.
As someone who doesn't have Facebook, barely uses Twitter (zero tweets, I just use tweetdeck to follow some people), doesn't share his GitHub account with employers (just don't really care to) - my resume still jumps to the top of the pile based solely on the big names I've worked for in the past.
So - yes.
Sure, you're going to add more qualifiers now, but I'm giving a counterpoint to your original claim.
I could easily add more qualifiers, but won't. I see the pattern and support my argument: The original poster is but one example. This company (fama.io) is in the business of performing exactly these types of social media background checks. (Reference: https://craft.co/fama/competitors)
As the masses (and I mean MASSES) of people buy into the social media explosion going on all over the planet, these "low-profile" individuals will A) become rarer, and B) start to look suspicious. Whether the sub-population of computer engineers see it for "what it is" or not; the general population apparently doesn't.
Example: I have a friend who, begrudgingly, created a Facebook account and used it rarely. Several months in, he started getting "friend" requests from (presumably) middle-eastern men, often shown with photos of AK-47s. If this is not a clear demonstration of a IS NULL business rule to figure out who might be anti-social, I don't know what it.
I stand by my prediction as well: Over time, a lack of an online presence (in a world where online presence is virtually required to live modern daily life) will be deemed "anti-social".
The lure (both ease and historical/digital facts) provided by scanning social media history will only grow in popularity.
I don't use any of these web sites either, and it has not, to my knowledge, affected my career. Have worked in FAANG and non-FAANG companies, and my non-use of social media has never once been brought up.
I don't think it matters that much. My only online presence under my real name is a locked-down Facebook account and an inactive LinkedIn profile with no profile pic, and I get recruitment emails from big tech companies pretty often.
I mean, you can doubt all you want, but Zuck still has tape over his laptop camera. Negative signals may show up higher. But neither of us has any data to back anything up, just anecdotes.
I think it's insane schools and companies are monitoring peoples social media, should keep work and personal separate.
For example went viral that a Christian school very recently expelled a girl because she had a rainbow cake that they seen in a photo on social media, and then heard some kid got in trouble for going to a gun range with his dad over the weekend and posting about having a fun day. Then there was another case with a college student.
Looks like many of these schools are currently being sued too, but recent developments. I think trying to control personal social media is over reaching. Not sure if companies get sued over this, but since many schools are government ran they are opening up a can of worms relating being subjected to section 1983 civil rights lawsuits. Plus schools keep cutting stuff due to funding, like one of the elementary schools nearby cut both art and music completely so I think they should tread carefully if they are going to start monitoring student's social media since they can't afford to be sued. One of those schools thought is a private school, so not sure how far that lawsuit would go since many states it's legal to discriminate against LGBT since not as protected like race is, you can get married on the weekend and be fired on Monday.
I'm torn between "My god, this is a dystopian nightmare" and "Well, you did all that in public, in print, with your real name attached, what did you expect?".
Maybe both things are right.
Edit: Since, looking at the downvotes, this seems to be controversial, let me clarify that I'm not blaming the victim, I'm questioning whether it's a good general policy to give everyone, including various bad actors, a vast database of information about you, carefully indexed and attached to your real name, that they can then use against you.
Beyond the question of aggregating someone's likes is the fact that the actual tweets flagged are ludicrous: the system has a third-grader's notion of "bad language" and a temperance activist's view of even _references_ to alcohol (not drinking excessively, or drinking at all, but literally seeing a bottle of vodka somewhere)
Even if the language understanding were better, you would still have the issue of the "toxicity" classifier reflecting the personal opinions of the people who built the model and not the range of acceptable behavior for the public at large. These labels aren't objectively measurable statistics: they're personal judgements. The tyranny of algorithmically reified personal moral judgement is far scarier to me than bad keyword matching.
I guess my point is, that's why you should be wary about giving them that information; because it will be used, in that manner, probably against you, forever.
> Is it normal to live your private life in accordance to what a future hypothetical employer might think ?
Increasingly so. That's one of the many reasons for my minimal presence on social media.
However, it's an entirely different question if its right to be put in the position of feeling you need to do that. I think there probably needs to be some adjustment to the legal situation to encourage employers to mind their own business.
I don't really know. Are you asking if it's right, or if it's normal? It's probably not right, but it's probably normal.
My personal opinion is you should probably control the information you give other people about yourself; information is power, and lots of people aren't very nice or are dangerously incompetent, and it seems like a bad idea to give them more leverage over you.
If you live in a country that assigns points to how good of a citizen you are where this point system determines if you get credit, or housing, or a job, then yes, this is normal.
Let's put aside the absurd conclusion that you can actually assess job fit and performance based on twitter engagement... you could scroll their feed for 5 minutes and have a more accurate feel for their attitude, humor, and public persona than this keyword matching.
If you HAVE to go this route...as an employer I'd rather see something like Github's contributions by DateTime showing me when they are most active on social media lol. Ah 200 posts every Monday at 2PM, eh? Interesting.
View the publicly available information that is available about you online. Contact us at privacy@fama.io to see a copy of your Fama report, if it has been created on behalf of a Customer. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours.
...
You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io, as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf. Further, Fama will delete all of the data that we have collected about you at your written request pending those same criteria.
I mean, as I see it the reason companies are requesting these checks is because of all the naming and shaming of companies whose employees were found to have posted inappropriate things (or done other actions). So naming and shaming them seems sort of ironic to me.
It’s about power dynamics. Generally speaking, one bad employee isn’t going to tank a company, whereas this makes it possible for one bad tweet to tank a person’s employment prospects.
The main thing I'm getting from this is that Twitter is terrible. Why do likes have to be public? Why can't you choose to make some tweets followers-only? Those two things would cripple this kind of background check.
(Mastodon has both of those, but a social network is only as good as its userbase, and Mastodon's is small and niche.)
300 pages is not all that surprising considering the amount of stuff that could be requested from some assortment of background check companies by whoever is willing to pay for it.
Even the background checks to open a bank account are commonly 50+ pages of information.
Whether or not the information is entirely correct (or even for the right person) is a whole other matter. Sure, a company could scrape someone’s tweets or assign probabilities to how likely various accounts and services are owned by that person, but at the end of the day it’s not 100%. Even alerts could come up for news articles mentioning a person of the same name from the same area as the person undergoing the background check, but is a completely different person. Depending on how much someone cares to read the whole report and the analysis versus just look at a few flag icons, that could make a difference.
In the end, as long as background check companies can still sell fear and risk, they can live with the tradeoffs of relying on statistical significance determinations to assess people.
I remember back in the 1980s when large numbers of regular folks were trying to come to grips with the question, "What the hell actually is a computer, anyway?". This phrase (GIGO) had to be repeated constantly. People had all these wild ideas that computers were just magic and could turn nothing into something. And that whatever information came out of a computer, it can't be wrong, because computers don't make mistakes.
After a while, it seemed to catch on and penetrate into the collective consciousness. People would even repeat "Garbage In, Garbage Out!" or "GIGO!" with delight, proud that they'd learned something about computers.
Anyway (finally) my point: it seems like we've regressed. GIGO wasn't common sense, and then it was, and now... it's not again? It feels like computer literacy is moving backward a bit.
It seems against the grain on this board, but people actually think airing all their little annoyances publicly online is a good idea that will never affect their actual lives?
You’re missing the point. This is a bad algorithm that is in effect nothing but false positives, and not even on his posts, but on posts he _liked_
Do you want to live in a world where you don’t dare to do or say _anything_ online that can be traced back to you, cause now you even have to factor in shitty algorithms like these? I sure don’t.
Exactly. I tend to browse Twitter on my phone. Judging by the number of times I've accidentally clicked on a tweet while scrolling, I'm sure I've accidentally "liked" more than a few tweets that I find abhorrent.
I'd hate to think that such mis-touches would harm me personally or professionally.
I stopped using my real name on social media in 2016. I wonder if Fama can still associate my posts with my fake names. Because if so, holy shit I'm fucked for dozens of reasons.
I guess they could ask Reddit and Hacker News for IP logs of user ip addresses, especially since HN doesn't delete accounts.
Yeah, you shouldn't count on it. Especially if they use neural networks - they likely have the know-how to identify you using your writing patterns (though the needle in the haystack issue might help you against not really persistent detectives...)
I think that was a LOL as in "your comment lacks understanding of the capabilities of neural networks in it's suggestion a neural network could identify someone in the pool of... everyone (lets even say in a certain area), based on writing style."
You'd need countless IDed writing samples to even give yourself a 50% chance of making a network able to with 50% accuracy match an unIDed writing sample to an IDed one.
Facial recognition is easier (yet still very hard) to implement because there're characteristics about people's faces that're hard to modify unless you're really trying.
Compared to writing style which could differ based on too many factors.
I'll just steal one of the comments from the article.
"It isn't new, and it's just as overstated as previous studies. The 80% accurate identification rate applies only within the 5,000 subjects. The identification rate will plummet when the pool of writers expands to everyone who can write in English"
Like I said, if you can narrow the pool to a small amount of people, than you probably could accomplish this (but even then, there's always the chance two people have similar writing styles.)
And if you had read further, you would have seen him corrected : it's 5k words, not 5k subjects. (And, also, I do raise this potential caveat in my mention of "needles"...)
I used a script to delete all my tweets on my twitter however many years ago. I'm not the one to say anything inflammatory/offensive but I just couldn't risk some errant like or retweet causing me grief in the future. It seems like that wasn't a bad move.
> I’ve used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine in my reporting to access long-deleted tweets from Roseanne Barr’s account and to examine the history of suspicious, viral accounts. However, the Wayback Machine’s archives are somewhat random and incomplete, showing only the last few tweets from each moment it crawled the account’s page.
If a company asks me to do a background check during application I will just instantly abort. Like ok, if they don't trust me that I'm not an asshole how can I trust them that they treat me right?
Online background checks increasingly incorporate all this social info but ALSO link it to other identity data.
Next, combine it with profiles bought from data brokers which can include all basic personal info combined with political affiliation and prior salary, etc.
Here's some steps to opt out of their databases: https://joindeleteme.com/help/deleteme-help-topics/opt-out-g...
So, cross-referencing databases is (usually) illegal for the government to do, but private companies can do it just fine? Am I the only one of noticing a loophole here?
In fairness I don’t use social media (well, other than posting here from time to time), so it’s difficult for me to identify with folks who spend a considerable (IMHO) amount of time recording their activities and thoughts on third party systems which have dubious, at best, privacy policies. My naive understanding of these platforms is for you to make yourself discoverable.
Can someone help me understand why after spending time over years recording yourself it is now a surprise companies are using that data?
Not sure who the GP is (I'm not dirty myself by going on Twitter just for this), but I assume a lot of people didn't realize at the time (and maybe still don't), that this is the kind of public discourse that does NOT quickly vanish into thin air, and all of the implications that follow?
I've built a very similar algorithm and website for a class I was taking a few years ago, however, we never considered monetizing it like this: https://github.com/adamwespiser/toxic-twitter
There is a large collection of "negative tweets" available in a public dataset, and training a simple neural network will give you a rough way to classify a tweet as either "toxic" or not with decently accuracy. However, there are problems.
- Basic algorithms are "context-free" and therefore don't get sarcasm or jest. There are more sophisticated approaches that can handle these semantic categories, but they require large datasets of tweets that do not publicly exist.
- The easiest thing the algorithm can learn is profanity, so for example, the model we built classified tweets in poor taste as "okay", if they were used with decent language.
- There is definitely a balanced dataset issue that makes training good classifiers harder, due to the overwhelming majority of tweets on twitter being positive, and it being hard to find unblocked toxic users.
At the time, we figured the best use of the website was to check your own twitter history, and although I find some of this user's tweet pretty offensive, I'm sad the day has come where people would actually need to use something like "toxic-twitter" to get a job! If anyone wants to fork this repo and get it up again, please reach out!
You're ... a little late to that realisation, though I only learnt of this a little over a year ago myself as Google+ was shutting down.
The project was called NSTIC: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. Alex Howard of O'Reilly's Radar had one of the most comprehensive explorations I've seen "A Manhattan Project for online identity: A look at the White House's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace."
The relationship with Google+ itself was spelled out by Kristine Schachinger at Searchengine Journal: "In Memoriam: The Rise, Fall & Death of Google Plus"
Google was only going to be one of many identity service providers for a program run by the Federal Government called the NSTIC, or National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.
Hi! My real name is Myfronds Callmeh Mahhname. Of course I can provide my national id for identity check, dear facebook. It's issued by proud nation of Djibouti.
Problem is, however, if you actually use facebook, it is trivial to get your real identity from your vanilla friend network, not to mention that one of them is bound to fuck up and tag you in their selfie.
I seriously doubt that punishing people for their opinions is going to change any minds. Totalitarian countries tried that for decades, with severe punishments. All it did was cause people to hide their opinions, and have a fake society with fake consensus that everyone knew was fake.
Fuck Fama and fuck any company using them. If you're a candidate and a company asks you to submit to one of these, just save them the time and write a giant fuck you on a piece of paper and hand it to them.
I wonder how long it will be before someone competent starts doing this and including deanonymized data from places like HN, Reddit, Twitter accounts without your real name attached, phone location, etc.
I personally think background checks should just be like, hey are you a violent person, but before any in person interview I’ve been a part of the person has been internet stalked by the whole group and anyone who knows the candidate or someone who does has gotten the tea. I just don’t see any value in this
The reason companies have to do so damn much checking upon hiring is because the employment laws make it damn near impossible to recover from a mistake. If you want to make a difference in this space, don't always vote for whatever issue the screws the rich companies.
I'm not sure where this comes from. Any halfway-competent company in a right-to-work state can drop you like a sack of potatoes with no cause or notice, and you won't be able to do anything unless you have a documented history of them doing something stupidly, obviously discriminatory.
Definitely not true in America, most low skill jobs I've worked about 40%+ of employees ended up fired. Most for "just not working out" rather than blatant insubordination.
California is different than the rest of America, and that's where my experience is from. Sun paid me out 6 months severence pay... it didn't seem fair to them. While working there it took about 6 months of intermittant dedicated effort for our manager to fire one of our co-workers.
In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days. Without that trial, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job because my resume had a big gap. But 10 years on and I'm still working for the guy who hired me.
Well that doesn't mean that it's California law that's the problem (California is an “at-will” state like the vast majority of states), but Sun's policies. Usually corporate policies only pays out severance for layoffs, not firings for poor performance, and severance is hardly required under California law.
A lot of white collar employers will usually try to work with poor performers to improve performance, but that's definitely not a given.
>In NZ I was hired via a 90-day trial where the employer could let me go for no reason given within 90 days.
This is extremely common in America too, it's called a "probationary period." My husband didn't even get any benefits during the six month probationary period at his last job.
There's also "contract to hire," which is, again, not uncommon in America. The new employee is employed by an external company for a set period of time and the employer can decide to hire him or her (or not) when the contract ends.
Internships are also used as a "try before you buy." Some employers mostly hire former interns for junior positions, that way they already know their skills and work ethic. I worked at two such companies where the vast majority of juniors were former interns.
So its the equivalent of a credit check but focused on how you conduct yourself online. I'm okay with this only if its law that the report details are shared with the applicant.
The odds of mistaken identity are too high with an automated service.
Or just ask Facebook about everything they've linked together. Maybe sign up for some sort of FB service, and then create a business model that abuses the access you've been granted to gain the information you're ultimately trying to get. If questioned about it, just blame some rouge employee as a scapegoat for being a bad apple abusing the trust that FB granted.
Maybe I'm not understanding. How would the company know the twitter account? Could you give them someone elses twitter account? Why did author give twitter account and get surprised when they have a report based on it?
My guess is they have an agreement with twitter where they provide the email address and twitter will tell you the account id. They would have the candidate's email address from their job application.
Startup idea: A service that seeds the Internet with only a fake, G-rated version of yourself that shows you liking pictures of kittens, automatically posting inspirational quotes, completely politically correct.
> You can opt out of our service by contacting us at privacy@fama.io as long as you have not provided written consent to one of our clients so Fama may access this information on your behalf.
My school district requires all volunteers to undergo a background check renewed every 2 years. I think it's pretty basic, mainly just criminal history. It's really a CYA for the district should anything harmful occur between a student and volunteer.
The name doesn't even need to be common. There are a dozen's dozen ways to spell my last name, and I've received emails intended for somebody else simply because the sender searched the directory and clicked the first hit they got.
For extra credit, I share the same name [spelling and all] with a decently famous musician. If you search for me you'll get him unless you include//exclude an extra choice word or two.
Specifically for the music artist, there was nothing wrong until my mid-to-late 30s. Both myself and the musician artist in question are similar in age.
Regarding common mis-spelling, that has been as issue for decades. It is a regular deal of "that's an 'e', not a 'o'".
At least one of my employers uses Sterling, and I can tell you that they never checked my social media, or even asked about it, as I got the paper report from them. I'm more apt to blame the employer than I am to blame the background check company - I seriously doubt they just throw in this kind of service for free.
Sterling is terrible not only because they’re needlessly invasive, but also because they cannot run a background check.
Before I got into software I was a model, something very obvious if you search my name. I’ve had two background checks done by Sterling and they’ve never connected the dots.
On the last background check I had with them, they marked every one of my previous employers as "unable to contact" and asked me to provide proof of employment. I have to wonder whether they just didn't bother picking up the phone.
From what I can tell, 4chan went downhill after smartphones became the norm, then very fast after 2015-16. If you're asking 'how could it go downhill any more than it was?' that means most of the hobbyists and content creators left. Most of the popular boards seem to be spam or copypasta threads only vaguely related to the board subject.
8chan was taken down after some mass shooters posted there but I don't know if it's gone permanently or just went to an onion server.
The idea that you can assess someone's workplace performance based on automated screening of their tweets is utterly absurd.
If anyone works somewhere that uses this tool, or anything similar to it, you should run far, far away from that company. This is a terrible precedent, and much too much Orwellian for my taste.
EDIT: somewhat related, but a while back I made a Twitter bot to delete my tweets because I was worried about how someone might misinterpret them: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/tweet-delete