At the Margins: Marginalized Communities' Ethical Concerns about Software

In this paper, we identified marginalized
communities’ ethical concerns about software. 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
585 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.