Social-media history check startup expands into screening election workers

Ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, the founder of a startup centered on conducting social-media background checks told StateScoop he’s expanding his platform to cater to a rising demand from government and political organizations seeking to exclude extremists from their ranks.

Darrin Lipscomb, the chief executive of Ferretly, a service that allows private companies and government agencies to screen existing and incoming employees’ online presences for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive posts, said he believes that a service like his will eventually become a common step in hiring background checks.

After a soft launch in July, the company is this week officially rolling out a new screening platform tailored for screening election workers.

“I think it’s an uncertain market and it’s a market where this is going to become mainstream and we’re seeing that,” Lipscomb said in an interview. “We’re seeing just the beginnings of this.”

Lipscomb said he has hundreds of customers all over the world, including professional sports teams, major financial institutions and political appointees — all of them interested in protecting their reputations by tacking on an additional, modern step to their hiring processes. The video game developer Blizzard Entertainment and the tech giant Deloitte use Ferretly.

Lipscomb said his software scrapes data from the seven most widely used social media platforms before running various machine-learning algorithms that provide employers a view into how prospective employees comport themselves online. Is your job candidate racist? How does she feel about abortion? Does she use profanity? And if so, how often? These are all questions Ferretly can answer for customers in neatly summarized abstracts of its data analyses.

He said political action committees appreciate his platform because it can quickly tell them whether volunteers are aligned on key policy issues. And in the year of what may be the most closely watched election in U.S. history, Lipscomb is banking on the interest of state and local government leaders to vet their seasonal personnel.

At private companies, failure to check hires’ online posts could be a financial liability. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that companies can be held liable for claims of a hostile work environment based on employees’ social media posts. That ruling followed a case brought by a prison psychologist who claimed the Federal Bureau of Prisons failed to address sexual harassment she’d received online from a coworker.

Ferretly flags online behaviors across 13 classifications. It can spot drug and alcohol references, extremist symbols like swastikas, “rude gestures” and “prejudicial or suggestive” remarks, among other categories. Beyond text it also analyzes images, including memes, along with user behaviors such as “liking” or sharing posts.

After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left more than 1,100 people dead, Lipscomb said a major hedge fund based in London began using Ferretly to scan its existing and new employees’ social media accounts for anti-semetic remarks. According to the Anti-Defamation League, since Oct. 7, Anti-Jewish tropes are on the rise and younger generations consider it increasingly socially acceptable to make antisemitic comments.

“We want to surface this information, flag it for a hiring manager and they can make their own determination as to whether or not that’s ‘hate speech’ in their mind,” Lipscomb said, adding that his company avoids the term “hate speech,” in preference of more-descriptive and less politically loaded terminology, such as “prejudicial remarks.”

In some cases, Ferretly’s spotlight has cost people their jobs. Lipscomb said an NCAA Division I sports team used his platform while hiring a new assistant coach, but didn’t run the analysis before hiring him. Two days later, they scanned his social media.

“He had made some disparaging or prejudicial remarks to what would be considered a protected class,” Lipscomb said. “They had to fire him as a result.”

Vetting elections workers would be a larger task. According to the Election Assistance Commission, more than 917,000 poll workers assisted with the 2016 election.

“Integrity of the election is everything,” Lipscomb said. “So I think the last thing these counties or secretaries of state want to be faced with is with an issue around questioning of: Why was this person hired to count ballots if they’re making these kinds of remarks?”