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Partisan Platforms: Responses to Perceived Liberal Bias in (Technical Paper)

Encouraging Employer Transparency: A Hiring Platform Tool for Value Conscious Workers (STS Paper)

A Thesis Prospectus Submitted to the

Faculty of the School of Engineering and Applied Science University of Virginia • Charlottesville, Virginia

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree Bachelor of Science, School of Engineering

Luke Giraudeau Spring, 2021

On my honor as a University Student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this assignment as defined by the Honor Guidelines for Thesis-Related Assignments

Signature ______Date ______Luke Giraudeau

Approved ______Date ______Ray Pettit, Department of Computer Science

Approved ______Date ______Upson Praphamontripong, Department of Computer Science

Approved ______Date ______Peter Norton, Department of Engineering and Society General Research Problem

What are the effects of online shunning?

Shunning is a culturally ubiquitous act with powerful social psychological effects. Online shunning, or cyberostracism, is similar in its effects to offline shunning (Williams, Cheung, &

Choi, 2000). Research suggests that social exclusion and rejection can have negative, positive, and neutral effects over varying time spans (DeWall & Bushman, 2011; Williams & Nida, 2011), but similar research is still needed for internet shunning, as it is a phenomenon isolated to the last few decades.

Encouraging Employer Transparency: A Hiring Platform Tool for Value Conscious

Workers

How can job listing websites better connect the unemployed to businesses that share mutual values?

The department is Computer Science, and the technical advisors are Ray Pettit and

Upsorn Praphamontripong. There will be no collaborators.

The project will propose a software system that improves the experience of connecting workers to employers in a manner that is ethical and transparent. Publicized cases of employee expulsion for ideological reasons that have surfaced in recent years underline the need for improved value system communication within corporations (Guynn, 2018).

The goals of the project are 1) to develop a new and unique embeddable web application,

2) to enable the comparison of values concisely and visibly, and 3) release and open source the software.

There are two constraints: concepts will be taken from the class Advanced Software

Development on code of conduct, ethics, and web applications and design suggestions and

processes will be taken from the class Human Computer Interaction towards streamlining the user experience.

Currently, companies provide statements through published documents hosted on their website to express the values they endear. However, this information is rarely available on platforms that post job listings, and so the potential employee must search or request rather than have the information immediately available.

The tool will be developed using the programming framework React JS, cloud hosting site Firebase, and published with MIT licensing on GitHub. The application will be functional, with a working prototype available for testing. Creating an open source project encourages collaboration and others to build upon it, which propagates the transparent motivation of the tool.

Partisan Platforms: Responses to Perceived Liberal Bias in Social Media

In the U.S. since 2018, how have political conservatives mobilized to counteract perceived liberal bias in social media?

In the U.S, public opinion about tech companies’ political biases is divided on partisan lines (Vogels, Perrin, & Anderson, 2020). In the U.S. since 2018, 69 percent of Republicans claim that technology companies favor liberal views, whereas only 19 percent of Democrats say that technology companies favor the alternative view. Over 50 percent of liberals believe that perspectives are treated equally, whereas only 22 percent of conservatives feel this way. Critics who allege bias have organized to promote legislation such as the Ending Support for Internet

Censorship Act (2020) and an executive order (Executive Order 13,925, 2020). Furthermore, conservative entrepreneurs have produced new social media platforms such as Gab and Parler that claim to honor users’ freedom of speech (Fair, Wesslen, 2019).

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According to Feuls, Fieseler, and Suphan (2014), “although social networks are typically positive stimuli, social media are not generally utilized when the individual’s perception of social media is negative.” Perception can be affected by mass media, data security distrust, personal motivations, competencies, and experiences, and “most notably, the individual’s social network.”

This study draws attention to the social and psychological effects of social media on shunned people. Kirdemir (2020) recently found heightened polarization on during the COVID-19 pandemic; most Twitter users primarily receive information consistent with the views they most endorsed. By deploying neutral bots to observe social media behavior on individual accounts,

Chen et al. (2020) found evidence of algorithmic content shifting and of content ranking that aligned with individuals’ personal biases.

Turning Point USA, a conservative student action organization, has alleged that

“Twitter//Instagram regularly restrict conservatives’ reach and suppress any news that could be potentially damaging to the Left” (Smith, 2020), and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy forum, has also claimed that they have seen “firsthand how Big Tech companies block or otherwise limit the reach of (our own) content… because that information doesn’t agree with certain platforms’ social or political agendas” (James, 2020). Conservative

Facebook groups that support Trump, such as the “NJ Women for Trump” group, believe that their group’s page was removed by the tech companies’ political biases (Fruen, 2020). PragerU, a conservative organization with a YouTube channel, filed a lawsuit in 2017 that alleged

Google’s “censorship is entirely ideologically driven” (PragerU, 2017). Conservative author

Charlie Kirk has charged that he was in “kind of hostage situation with Twitter” after Twitter allegedly locked him out of his account (O’Reilly, 2020). Conservative writer and activist Brent

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Bozell has claimed that “if they can do it to the president of the United States, they can do it to anyone …every platform in Silicon Valley today is censoring conservatives” (Flood, 2020).

References

Chen, W., Pacheco, D., Yang, K., Menczer, F. (2020). Neutral Bots Reveal Political Bias on Social Media. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08141

DeWall, C., & Bushman, B. (2011). Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(4), 256-260. JSTOR.

Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, S. 1914, 116th Cong., (2020).

Exec. Order No. 13,925, 3 C.F.R. 34079-34083 (2020).

Fair, G., & Wesslen, R. (2019). Shouting into the Void: A Database of the Alternative Social Media Platform Gab. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 13(01), 608-610. https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/3258

Feuls, M., Fieseler, C., & Suphan, A. (2014). A social net? Internet and social media use during unemployment. Work, Employment & Society, 28(4), 551-570. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24442187

Flood, B. (2020, September 21). Conservative group launches website to battle big tech companies over online censorship. . https://www.foxnews.com/media/online- censorship-conservative-big-tech

Fruen, L. (2020, November 01). President says banned 'NJ Women for Trump' Facebook group will be restored immediately. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- 8902463/President-demands-Facebook-reinstate-New-Jersey-Women-Trump- removed.html

Guynn, J. (2018, March 02). accused in lawsuit of excluding white and Asian men in hiring to boost diversity. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/01/google-accused-lawsuit-excluding- white-and-asian-men-hiring-boost-diversity/387532002/

James, K. (2020). Social Media's Preemptive Spiking of New York Post Story Shows Bias Against Conservatives Continues. The Heritage Foundation. https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/social-medias-preemptive-spiking- new-york-post-story-shows-bias-against

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Kirdemir, B. (2020). Turkey’s Digital News Landscape: Polarization, Social Media, And Emerging Trends. Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies. doi:10.2307/resrep26092

O'Reilly, A. (2020, October 19). says he's in 'a hostage situation' with Twitter after social media giant blocks his account. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/charlie-kirk-says-hes-in-a-hostage-situation-with- twitter-after-social-media-giant-blocks-his-account

PragerU Takes Legal Action Against Google and YouTube for . (2017). PragerU. https://www.prageru.com/press-release/prageru-takes-legal-action-against-google-and- -for-discrimination/

Russell, H. (1999). Friends in Low Places: Gender, Unemployment, and Sociability. Work, Employment & Society, 13(2), 205-224. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23747850

Smith, R. (2020). Big Tech Crossed A Censorship Line. Turning Point USA. https://www.tpusa.com/live/this-week-big-tech-crossed-a-censorship-line

Vogels, E., Perrin, A., & Anderson, M. (2020). Most Americans Think Social Media Sites Censor Political Viewpoints. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2020/08/19/most-americans-think-social-media- sites-censor-political-viewpoints/

Williams, K., Cheung, C., & Choi, C. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of Being Ignored Over the Internet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 748-762.

Williams, K., & Nida, S. (2011). Ostracism: Consequences and Coping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(2), 71-75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23045755

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