Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Social media are transforming the information-media landscape and the practices of newsrooms. They are measured by social media analytics, in terms of who is using social media content, where they are, what they are doing with it and how the content is circulating in networks. Social media analytics provide media organizations and others with a new and greater knowledge of their audience. This paper reports the uses by one media organization, the BBC World Service, of one company's social media analytics packages. While representing users' behavior, analytics agglomerate this roughly, and they do so using techniques, or algorithms, that are opaque, and that sum data with different and in some cases unknown qualities. The users of these packages can have only a limited understanding of the validity, reliability or meaning of vast quantities of data that is presented as self-evidential and obviously useful. At the same time, social media analytics provide affordances to transform social and media relations, in that they empower users in relation to producers in media organizations. Far from neutral instruments, social media analytics represent the organizational structure and context in which they are used. The paper discusses the implications of these packages for journalism and for democracy, and concludes with discussion of some key ethical implications of social media data and analytics packages that arise from the power relations that are implicated in social media analytics.
Introduction
Social media applications or platforms are fast-changing and take many forms. At their heart is electronically-mediated, peer-to-peer sharing of usergenerated content in communities or networks. Increasingly social media are used as channels for businesses, politicians, mainstream media organizations and others to communicate with their audiences, fans, users, customers, or supporters. The best-known include Facebook and Twitter, but as well as social networking and micro blogging sites, social media include blogs, discussion forums, social news sites, photo and video sharing, and review and rating sites. Social media analytics (or monitoring) tools have been developed and deployed in business, marketing, public relations and related fields to measure and analyze uses of social media - who is receiving it, where they are, what they are doing with it and how it circulates in networks. They work with a form of "big data" (boyd and Crawford...