Social Credit Systems, coming soon to a democracy near you | Hacker News Reader

Social Credit Systems, coming soon to a democracy near you

fama.io

59 pointsbidart32 comments

This main thread this is related to is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211363.

Please don't editorialize titles like that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Okay so everyone go here: https://fama.io/product/

It has examples of what Fama "finds". Here are some from the website (some might be offensive):

1. “white people can't say the n word, but at least we can say we know our dads and that police don't target us”

2. “Kyle and Pete are really trying to convince me that One Direction is cool. They’re one more gay comment away from being kicked out of my apartment.”

3. “Work is the last place I want to be right now”

4. “Black men like thick chains because it reminds them of the good ‘ol days”

5. “You can’t buy a girl a drink and not have sex with her after, I don’t care what you have to do, get what you paid for.”

6. “Unpopular opinion - black lives only kind of matter.”

Plenty of racist comments there. But getting red flagged as a potential 'toxic employee' for saying that you don't like your job? I mean come on... That's dystopian as hell and straight out of 1984. Call me old fashioned but I don't think people should lose future employment opportunities for a few dumb twitter comments. This is taking political correctness to some next-level techno-nightmare.

Maybe it's time to get ahead of the curve here and make a startup that provides people with new identities complete with online banking, 'social credit', and face masks to fool humans / AI.

How about I make this offer to companies I'll show up do my job to the best of my ability and get a paycheck, I'll also agree to not talk about politics religion or other contentious issues that lead to bad feelings.

In return you agree to judge me on how well I do my job and make you money and we all agree that whatever shit I do on my own time is my problem not yours. How's that sound?

This is Madness! Madness I tell you!

Honestly, this used to be the norm but now? There is no norm. Only a race in all directions, in the hope of optioning a goal.

Companies already scan social media. No surprise someone built a company around it. Too bad it does not root out toxic or incompetent management.

I'm curious about the legality of it. How do we know it won't discriminate illegally? Or how does an employee dispute the information?

The applicant likely will never know why they were rejected. How long would it take for someone to realize they could assassinate the character of a rival or someone they simply didn't like by posting with a fake account in places the AI is likely the source input? The target might never know that the false posts exists while being silently passed over.

Funny how just using the culturally appropriate term “toxic workplace behavior” and all of sudden it doesn’t sound so bad. Who wouldn’t want that.

The workplace extends into personal life now. People tweet shit publicly, and they publicly associate themselves with a company via Linkedin. So if this person says the wrong thing, people will harass them and the company they work for.

It's the sound business choice to see which employees are saying online and screen for people who could say the wrong thing and cause PR issues for the company.

The question is - does the "bad PR" really matter? Is there actual data/research proving that it in fact has an impact on the business profits? I doubt that people won't go and watch the latest Guardians of Galaxy just because James Gunn is back at directing it. I wouldn't put that much weight on the usual twitter outrages.

I'm split on this. On one hand this company is pure evil (as i've said before), but on the other this would exactly what I would use to screen employees that I'd hire. There is some terrible shit people say online that reflects who they are as a person who I would want to stay far away from the company I built.

EDIT. An example of what I would screen for are the following: - "locker room" discussions on a profile they put their name on. off color jokes and all that - "woke" discussions about oppression and how you're more oppressed if you are X, while group Y isn't

Both of those are people who I would not want around.

The issue is that there is no way their algorithm understands context. Saying "Fuck nazis" will probably flag you for swearing and being a nazi. An actual person looking your tweets/posts can understand the context.

An actual person looking at a list of tweets/posts hundreds-long is not going to spend more than a few seconds at most on average per tweet. That's not enough time to understand context. As a matter of fact, I've given up trying to engage on social media debates precisely because most of the time, the other party(ies) in the conversation still do not understand context despite being part of the conversation! Often because they are not spending more than a few seconds themselves. I remember conversations being a lot more civil when done by e-mail.

You don't need a lot more than a few seconds to understand that "Fuck, i am tired" or "Fuck nazis" is not something inherently bad. For an algorithm - i am not so sure (even a company as huge as youtube cannot figure it out).

That's a poor example. How about a message that gets flagged, where the message is a strong frustration at an issue that is very nuanced? Do you jump to conclusions on the person's point of view? Do you assume that the person is prone to being angry, just because you've seen a selection of angry posts from them?

There's many things that can go wrong there, and they will, given a system like this operating in the wild.

But does it really matter so long as they don't bring it into the workplace. Like does it matter if the person you sit next to spends their free time beating squirrels as long as they don't spend hours of time talking about it at work and making you look at their pictures?

On the flip side would you want to have on your team someone who sucks at their job and who you always have to cover for but they spend all their free time helping teach one eyed orphans how to do multivariate calculus?

Does it matter as long as they keep their personal life at home and their professional life at work?

You're right, it doesn't matter. What matters is that stuff that can be viewed as controversial or actively discriminates against someone/group of people can be found under their name.

Look that story a few years ago where a woman tweeted something like "I'm going to Africa something something aids. jk I'm white." People got pissed and attacked her company.

I don't care she said that. I care that she was stupid enough to say that under her own name.

Speaking as someone who has spent multiple decades in niche Internet communities, I can vouch that in many cases, it's taken out of context when talked about or observed by a third party. Sometimes (often?) it's not as much of an attack against another person as it appears, and sometimes it's just outright satirical. It's your prerogative to judge how you see fit, but by doing so you legitimize an orwellian crackdown on free expression (and please spare me the tired argument that that's okay as long as it's not state-sponsored).

From my point of view, a person's conduct on the Internet when pseudonymous does not necessarily reflect on a person's ability to conduct themselves professionally at the workplace or in front of customers.

Is there an epidemic of people spouting off at the workplace? I must have missed the memo.

If you look in my recent comment history, you'll see one where I'm advocating for a debate platform that weights submission/comment voting by user similarity. The buried lede in that concept is that you could use that same platform to collect (and sell) data about how people get along with other people, or about how similar they are to known desirable (and undesirable) users.

So I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that anything along those lines will immediately be used to target marginalized people and will generally be ignored for certain privileged groups. You yourself are giving an example.

We should definitely not be doing anything of the sort.

That's the company behind

I had to get a background check for my job; the report is a 300 page pdf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211363

Right?

I have engaged in what this company might call "toxic" behavior in online forums, It does not mean I will behave like this in the work place.

Sarcastic, anti-social internet trolls are some of the smartest people you'll ever meet and are the people you want working for your company. And they are generally smart enough no know not to behave like that in the workplace.

100% correct - the company linked assumes everyone behaves the same all the time in every scenario - which is naive at best.

Some forums swearing and sarcasm is OK, it’s not a professional work environment and there’s no obligation to not hurt someone’s wittle fweelings by sugar coating the big fat dose of reality that many people need to hear.

Do you set up your accounts in a way that makes it easy for others on those forums to associate you with your employer?

Previous threads of interest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211363 (today)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22086331 (14 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10371715 (2015)

I saw this on Twitter and emailed a request to "privacy@fama.io" to remove any and all information they have on me.

I highly doubt that this is legal in EU, but I'm not an expert.

The reason is that at my current client, we are not allowed to google a name from an incoming resume, due to privacy reasons. Not even search that person on linkedin.

Maybe they are overinterpreting the EU privacy law, but I'm not sure.

I would criticize this product but I don't want to lose future employment opportunities.

You want to work for companies that use this service?

Someday we might not have a choice.

Can't wait to make people who disagree with my worldview destitute!

This may just select for obedient employees. Which, may very well be what employers need. But, it could potentially eliminate diversity of opinion. (Presumably that offers some advantage...)

I don't think this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

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