The problem here is rather likely to be to not have someone with human science background... but then that person would likely just tell them their whole premise is flawed?

I don't think so. There are valid use cases for sentiment analysis, but you need to understand the limitations of your training data and probably still want humans to QC at least some representative proportion of flagged posts, if you're going to do this legitimately. Of course a company like this just wants to sell any garbage they can dig up.

Well, I will admit that I am quite ignorant of what exactly a background check is, but I just don't see how such a morally fraught question can be legally allowed to be decided by anyone else than a psychologist.

In fact, considering the moral hazard, I don't even see how even using an AI, even as simple as "grep", helping that psychologist in the cost-minimization contexts of a private company would not result in an unacceptable slippery slope where the psychologist would end up just rubber-stamping the decisions of the AI and its creator ? Maybe someone with a dual data "science" / psychology degree would be acceptable, but I'm guessing he/she wouldn't be able to use any "black box" AI...

That’s not what moral hazard means.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Right, it's probably inappropriate to use this term at this specific place in my argument.

However, in what is probably not just a coincidence, the global issue this is only one facet of is about the information asymmetry between citizens and corporations...

People who live in Scunthorpe or Apeniston would have a great time with these things, I imagine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

AWS and Azure both have services for this now. Tweet sentiment analysis is like the first getting started tutorial you land on when you hit both of their docs.

This is exactly the kind of hysteria that will tear society apart.

The types of jokes a person shares and enjoys outside of the office by and large are not a reflection of character, even when they are racist, sexist, or some other -ist. In fact that's the very reason that they are funny, because they are counter to norms. There's nothing immature or childish about this if you're not oversocialized.

Believe it or not, it's possible to be a competent programmer and decent human being while occasionally indulging in an off color joke. Humor is a form of release. You've lived a sheltered life if you're unaware of how perfectly normal and nearly ubiquitous so called "locker room talk" is.

Your post is a perfect example of a dangerous overreaction. Suddenly liking the wrong post makes me an "incel" and keeps me from contributing to society. Isn't that a little crazy?

> The types of jokes a person shares and enjoys outside of the office by and large are not a reflection of character, even when they are racist, sexist, or some other -ist.

If most of your social media posts are you liking racist, sexist or some other ist content, I will avoid you. Who wouldn't?

I wouldn't, because I don't use social media, and it wouldn't make sense to avoid someone based on something I don't know about.

This is a toddler level correlation/causation conflation and misunderstanding of psychological motivations and a thorough lack of understanding of humor. To assign so much meaning to a like is to presume to understand its meaning. But what if the like itself is ironic, sarcastic, or merely a bookmark? This kind of literalist interpretation is laughable, and will surely be looked upon in the future as a cringe-worthy kind of scientism that bloodletting and "alignment of the four humors" is now.

Please read my comment again. One like from your personal Twitter account on a nazi post or conspiracy theory meme means nothing. 90% likes on such content categories from your personal account? That means a lot about you.

I understand your comment just fine the first time I read it. It's not the first time that someone's come up with such a hare-brained idea, and it's certainly not the last. If you are presuming that an account "liking" a post means that 1) the account is genuine reflection of what a person believes deep down and 2) that they are using the "like" action to indicate that they agree with the post, then you're making a lot of assumptions that are rarely true. In fact, they're so rarely true that at a certain point, Facebook added reactions because the "like" button was so noisy!

The idea one can judge what someone thinks based on context-free metadata without actually talking to them, reading what they've written, or judging what they've done is hilarious. It's so fundamentally at odds with how human beings work and think (specifically with respect to satire[0] and irony) that it beggars belief. If Charlie Chaplin were alive today and acting out one of his greatest satires[1] on Twitter, a certain well known German dictator would be part of the punchline. But so too would be you, for taking it at face value.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire#Social_and_psychologica...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Chaplin#The_Great_Dict...

What if I'm using that account to bookmark posts for my research for a book on neo Nazi atrocities? Your argument is absurd. You cannot know any meaning from any number of likes. That's the absurd part. That you think that at some number, likes become meaningful in a way you can understand. That's simply not the case. We can't even know what authors of classical books were thinking, people like Plato and Aristotle with certainty, people that left us with works of thousands of words. But you pretend to be the genius who can derive meaning from a hundred tweets? The absurdity and arrogance on display here is unbelievable.