Publications

Journal Articles

The Best Ends by the Best Means: Ethical Concerns in App Reviews

• Authors: Lauren Olson, Neelam Tjikhoeri, Emitzá Guzmán
• Journal: Empirical Software Engineering
• Abstract: This study analyzes ethical concerns in users’ app store reviews, highlighting issues like censorship, identity theft, and safety. We collected five million reviews, manually labeled a sample, and found that ethical concerns are prevalent, often resulting in longer, more popular, and lower-rated reviews. Our findings suggest high potential for automated classification and emphasize the importance of considering ethical concerns in software development.
• Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.11063

Whose voices are heard? Gender disparities in platform-facilitated discrimination and content moderation

• Authors: Lauren Olson, Ricarda Anna-Lena Fischer, Tom P. Humbert, Florian Kunneman, Emitzá Guzmán
• Journal: Information and Software Technology
• Abstract: Context: Historically, cisgender men have maintained systemic social, cultural, and political privilege over other genders. Online discrimination serves as a mechanism for reinforcing this dominance. Content moderation plays a crucial role in shaping online experiences, yet the ways it may perpetuate or mitigate discrimination remain underexplored. Objective: This study examines how content moderation and discussions of discrimination vary across gendered online communities, with a focus on identifying differential impacts by gender group. Methods: We analyzed 124 subreddits spanning three gender groups—women, men, and gender minorities (GM). The analysis included manual annotation of 1,535 posts and machine learning classification of an additional 6,613 posts to assess the prevalence of user discussions regarding online discrimination and content moderation. Results: Women were most likely to report top-down moderation issues, such as bans and content removal, while GM users engaged more frequently with general moderation concerns. Time series analysis revealed that complaints about content moderation have increased over time, with the steepest rise among women users. These patterns demonstrate that moderation policies and enforcement impact gender groups differently. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the need for improvements in software engineering and user experience design for content moderation tools. Enhancing transparency, promoting equity, and enabling more user-driven moderation experiences are critical steps toward protecting marginalized groups against discrimination online.
• Link:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584925002381

Crossing margins: Intersectional users’ ethical concerns about software

• Authors: Lauren Olson, Tom P. Humbert, Ricarda Anna-Lena Fischer, Florian Kunneman, Emitzá Guzmán
• Journal: Empirical Software Engineering
• Abstract: Many modern software applications present numerous ethical concerns due to conflicts between users’ values and companies’ priorities. Intersectional communities, those with multiple marginalized identities, are disproportionately affected by these ethical issues, leading to legal, financial, and reputational issues for software companies, as well as real-world harm for intersectional users. Historically, the voices of intersectional communities have been systematically marginalized and excluded from contributing their unique perspectives to software design, perpetuating software-related ethical concerns. This work aims to fill the gap in research on intersectional users’ software-related perspectives and provide software practitioners with a starting point to address their ethical concerns. We aggregated and analyzed the intersectional users’ ethical concerns over time and developed a prioritization method to identify critical concerns. To achieve this, we collected posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications, utilized deep learning to identify ethical concerns in these posts, and employed state-of-the-art techniques to analyze their content in relation to time and priority. Our findings revealed that intersectional communities report \textit{critical} complaints related to cyberbullying, inappropriate content, and discrimination, highlighting significant flaws in modern software, particularly for intersectional users. Based on these findings, we discuss how to better address the ethical concerns of intersectional users in software development.
• Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.08090

Conference Papers

Along the margins: Marginalized communities’ ethical concerns about social platforms

• Authors: Lauren Olson, Emitzá Guzman, Florian Kunneman
• Conference: 2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS)
• Abstract: We identified ethical concerns of marginalized communities about social platforms by analyzing 586 subreddits. Our findings show that these concerns primarily involve discrimination and misrepresentation, highlighting shortcomings in current software development practices. We also explored the potential for automatically classifying these concerns using natural language processing (NLP).
• Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel7/10173779/10173870/10173905.pdf

Who Speaks for Ethics? How Demographics Shape Ethical Advocacy in Software Development

• Authors: Lauren Olson, Ricarda Anna-Lena Fischer, Florian Kunneman, Emitzá Guzmán
• Conference: FAccT ‘25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
• Abstract: This study explores how software developers’ demographic backgrounds shape their capacity to perceive and advocate for ethical concerns. Based on a survey of 217 practitioners across diverse roles and regions, the findings show that marginalized groups—such as women, BIPOC, and disabled individuals—report ethical concerns more frequently and feel more empowered to address them. However, organizational environments often fail to support ethical advocacy across the board. The authors call for reforms in software education and development that prioritize diverse perspectives to promote more equitable and responsible computing.
• Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10276

Extended Abstracts

Custom Developer GPT for Ethical AI Solutions

• Authors: Lauren Olson
• Journal: Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 3rd International Conference on AI Engineering - Software Engineering for AI
• Abstract: This project aims to develop a custom Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) to help developers address ethical issues in AI engineering. The conversational agent will guide compliance with legal frameworks like the EU AI Act and GDPR, and offer alternative ethical perspectives. We outline the need for this tool, describe its design, and demonstrate its use, showing how it can help practitioners create AI solutions that meet legal standards and embrace diverse ethical viewpoints.
• Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3644815.3644987