by William A. Jacobson at legalinsurrection.com
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’.
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.