I appeared Thursday night, July 13, 2023, on Rich Valdés America at Night!.
We started off talking about the recent court ruling on government collusion with big tech to censor conservatives, but spent most of the time talking about how the Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) has called public attention to how LinkedIn uses its ‘Diversity in Recruiting’ feature to manipulate pools of candidates to achieve demographic ‘diversity’.
My segment starts at the 42:00 mark (click to jump ahead)
Rich Valdes:
…. Parlaying that into the topic at hand, which is the biggest professional networking platform out there. LinkedIn, another social media application in its own right, is now being accused or found to have manipulated candidate pools for jobs that are available on the website based on race and other EEOC protected categories. And I think this is not, again, not a surprise. We’ve seen another big ruling that just came out reversing affirmative action. And I think things like this will continue where you still, you strike things down, but you’re gonna have admissions policies or LinkedIn, algorithms that are still gonna hold true to what they believe.
WAJ:
Well, this is something that we raised at Equal Protection Project, which is their diversity in recruiting program at LinkedIn. And what it is, they have tweaked their algorithms. Nobody sees it, nobody really knows what’s going on, but they do it, admit it. They tweak their algorithms so that when they present pools of potential employees, candidates, potential hires, job seekers to employers, they manipulate those pools to give a diverse pool.
So if you’re an engineer and you’re applying for a job, their algorithms don’t just look at your grades in college or your job experience, or where you worked or what your specialty is. It will also consider, if you’ve consented, which probably most people do, they check the box that LinkedIn can use your demographic information, they will then tweak that pool and take into account other things. So they’re basically discriminating against people on the base of race and other factors as part of this Diversity In Recruiting program. And that’s how they’re manipulating it.
And getting to your point about what the Supreme Court just decided, this is how the Supreme Court’s admonition that you can’t use race as a factor in admission and by implication other ways is going to be evaded. They’ll plug it into their algorithms, they’ll plug it into their artificial intelligence, they’ll plug it into their [computer] program, and you will never know. And that’s why I think what’s happening at LinkedIn is so important.
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… It’s not even clear how much the employers know about what’s going on. LinkedIn has not been forthcoming with that information.
So what this does is it really skews the whole pool. If you qualify for their diversity criteria, then you in a sense, you get a plus factor. You will get promoted as they diversify the pool. Whereas if you don’t qualify for it, then you don’t get that promotion. So this is exactly, in many ways, it mirrors what Harvard was doing to the detriment, in Harvard’s case of, of Asian students, mostly, where they take that demographic information into account in order to achieve diversity. And the Supreme Court said, at least with regard to university admissions, you can’t do that.
So it’s really something that LinkedIn is not very transparent about. They don’t reveal exactly how they manipulate these pools, but they do admit that they adjust the pools. They don’t admit what the employers know, except they say the employers can’t use this to screen people. But what does that make a difference? Because LinkedIn is the one doing the screening based on these protected factors.
LinkedIn, throughout its website has repeated, promises that they don’t tolerate discrimination. And at almost every level they say that we do not discriminate. We don’t allow it, we don’t allow others to discriminate. If you make suggestions in your job postings that you might discriminate we’ll take you down and kick you out, yet this is exactly what LinkedIn is doing. So they’re, they’re violating their own promise to the users to maintain a discrimination free environment….
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