Crossing Margins: Intersectional Users' Ethical Concerns about Software

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 consequences 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 methodology for analyzing intersectional voices in software ethics discourse. We collected 36,777 posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications and utilized large language models to identify ethical concerns in these posts. We then applied regression models with counterfactual analysis to examine how intersectional identity dimensions shape the amplification or suppression of ethical concern expression across software genres, and conducted a time-series analysis to examine how concern expression varies over time in relation to real-world events. As a case study in the social media domain, we further demonstrate how identified ethical concerns can be prioritized to surface issues warranting timely developer attention, validated against survey-derived ground truth. Together, these analyses form the basis of a nascent feedback-driven framework for assessing whether software systems are meeting the needs of intersectional users.