Along the Margins: Marginalized Communities' Ethical Concerns about Social Platforms

Abstract

In this paper, we identified marginalized communities' ethical concerns about social platforms. We performed this identification because recent platform malfeasance indicates that software teams prioritize shareholder concerns over user concerns. Additionally, these platform shortcomings often have devastating effects on marginalized populations. We first scraped 586 marginalized communities' subreddits, aggregated a dataset of their social platform mentions and manually annotated mentions of ethical concerns in these data. We subsequently analyzed trends in the manually annotated data and tested the extent to which ethical concerns can be automatically classified by means of natural language processing (NLP). We found that marginalized communities' ethical concerns predominantly revolve around discrimination and misrepresentation, and reveal deficiencies in current software development practices. As such, researchers and developers could use our work to further investigate these concerns and rectify current software flaws.In this paper, we identified marginalized communities' ethical concerns about social platforms. We did this because recent platform wrongdoing indicates that software teams prioritize profit over user concerns. Additionally, these platform shortcomings often have devastating effects on marginalized populations. To accomplish this, we collected Reddit posts from marginalized communities' subreddits where users mention social media platforms. Then, we labeled whether posts contained mentions of ethical concerns, like privacy or misinformation. Finally, we established trends within the resulting data and used artificial intelligence (AI) to find these ethical concerns automatically. We discovered that marginalized communities' ethical concerns revolve around discrimination and misrepresentation, among other problems, and reveal deficiencies in current social platforms. As such, researchers and software engineers could use our work to further investigate these concerns and rectify present software flaws.