“What’s Happening At LinkedIn Is So Important” Because Discrimination By Algorithm Is The Future Of Affirmative Action
My appearance on the Rich Valdés America at Night! show, talking about LinkedIn practices exposed by the Equal Protection Project, and how discrimination will go even more high tech after the Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action ruling: “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.”
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)
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
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.
***
… 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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Comments
Corporate America has been discriminating for a very long time. In 1992 i left the US Navy as a Nuclear Submarine Officer. I worked with a recruiter who had a stable of seven Submarine Officers (all white men) and one Supply Officer (white female). We had group interviews at about 30 of the fortune 100. Out of 180 interviews for the white men not a single offer. The women got offers from 24 of 30.
By the way the jobs were all technical. Submarine Officers are the most technically trained in the armed forces. Supply Officers are the least trained and not at all technical.
Keep in mind, though, that these corporations discriminated to gain the federal government brownie points available for doing so, and to avoid the federal investigations involved with not doing so.
Yep. The same way that the federal government perverted the debt markets with the CRA and forced banks to write bad paper. It wasn’t much of a fight, the banks could either write the bogus loans (and offload them to Fannie/Freddie for huge premiums) or they could do real business and have 10 different federal agencies giving them full body cavity searches every two weeks and having to burn millions in legal fees fighting all manner of un-Constitutional nuisance suit that the feds (and “community organizers”) would bring against them. It was the old Pablo Escobar offer, “Silver or lead”, in ‘legal’ terms.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+linkedin
Linkedin deserves the Bud Lite treatment. Bring them down.
Let’s urinate in their “diversity” pool…
I would be afraid to expose anything, Dems appear to be the party of loons.
Racism by algorithm is a perfect example of systemic racism. When someone believes in systemic racism, I always ask what part of the system they are referring to. Is in in a traing manual, coded into law, written in a hand book, programed in a computer, detailed in a policy? Just where exactly is it? To date, no one has been able to answer that question.
Yes, there is systemic racism against asians and white but not Black people. This is just another example…..
It seems like this is a problem with young arrogant companies who think that they are so successful that they can afford to play these games. Maybe antitrust is the best way reign them in. Break them up so that there is enough competition that they cannot afford to stray.
back in the 198o’s it was a well known fact, that unless you were a minority female, to not even bother trying for a job posting of USPS or UPS.
Most government jobs (federal and state and municipal) are nothing but stealth welfare programs. And many of these people do more damage to society by pretending to work than they would by just being paid to stay away from computers, machinery, and people.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was enacted largely to ensure that predictive analytics scorecards do not discriminate by race. Perhaps similar legislation is needed in other areas as predictive analytics becomes ubiquitous.
I would like to see Kamala Harris define “algorithm”.
She’ll probably say it has something to do with music by Al Gore.
Private companies should have the right to hire or fire anyone they want, for whatever reasons they want (or even no reason). This country needs to respect private property, which is the wellspring from which almost all individual liberties flow.
If Linkedin wants to just hire tranny girlymen and minorities, then that is their prerogative. I don’t care. I just don’t know why anyone uses Linkedin, at all.
That’s not how socialism/communism works…
Don’t kid yourselves. Voting history and political contributions, as well as gossip, can fit into an algorithm, too.
As well as posting comments on the internet.
Resumes today are bursting with nonsensical, nauseating, word-salad puffery. I’d like to see a photo included. I can tell a lot more about a man’s character from his appearance than from all the polysyllabic, breathless braggadocio in the world.
Yeah, but the face tattoos, the blue hair, the nose rings, the bad grooming….
They are being scooped up by the military recruiters.
Legally, if you haven’t checked the box that allows the use of your demographic information, that is not supposed to factor into hiring decisions. But it does. I didn’t check it once. No response. Later resubmitted and checked. An interview. Lot of opportunities out there for some successful litigation I think.