this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
355 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
59312 readers
4649 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I for one welcome... blah blah
Yeah this is scary and honestly why I'm super careful what I put online. Well, mostly.
There are professional social media checkers who will find your hidden/locked social media (and Reddit etc).
They get hired by recruitment agencies or companies who are hiring.
And on the surface it could be to check no one is a secret nazi/chauvanist etc
But I bet there's secondary data about political leanings or how "appropriate" your friends are.
Or if you're willing to be a part of the old boy's club (coke and strippers is fine for execs, but you can't have a nephew who is in a labor union etc).
Yep. The CCP's social credit system was always going to be the end game of surveillance capitalism. It will be spearheaded by conservatives because they're the most religious, authoritarian, and have an innate desire to restrict social progress and enforce their views on everyone else.
The best part is they'll claim it's completely different and represents Freedom™️ because it'll be established by capitalism... Even though it's functionally identical, the CCP are more capitalist than communist, and western conservatives jizz their pants at the level of power and control the CCP have over the Chinese people.
Yeah, my company for sure checks all social media during hiring background checks.
Your HR are morons.
The general thought or claim for companies that do or permit this is that they're performing some sort of due diligence or that it increases their knowledge of the candidate. The problem is that even if they tried to be objective it's easy for a candidate to claim discrimination, even if it's not discriminatory on it's face. Why?
When you get asked questions in a job interview or on a screening form, it's very easy to control that these questions and the implied related decisions are related to the job, work and just that. The screening questions for protected classes you see (are you a vet, disabled, what is your sex, ethnic background, etc.) are almost exclusively stored for reporting purposes and not even accessible during the hiring process, which is a good thing for reducing bias. Outside of a candidate volunteering "I'm Hindu" in an interview, the hiring team and/or HR for the most part would have no way to be exposed to lots of personal information about the candidate.
Enter social media. If you work for a company and click on an applicant's social media profile and see them sacrificing a goat with a group of people and are scared or disturbed and change course in the hiring process, guess what, you just likely discriminated on the basis of religion. Picture of them partying and drinking with friends, don't look responsible. Guess what they were at a club specific to their sexual orientation or identity and you just screwed your company. The key point in these examples is that even if you didn't consider a post or image in your decision, it's difficult to prove, and social media is an entire library of potential biased or protected classes.
Every piece of data available has shown that humans are unable to control biases in the interview process. Allowing or endorsing social media screening for companies is not only a terrible liability, but it's not going to be effective as your humans are going to fall victim to the same biases they normally do and make the same mediocre decisions they currently do.
If you're interested in this topic or Human Resources related subjects, take a look at [email protected] (https://lemmy.world/c/ask_hr )