Abstract
Commercial social insights companies, which analyse social media activity on behalf of paying clients, play an important role in making social media data mining ordinary but, to date, very little research has been carried out into them. Kennedy draws on interviews and online research to provide a brief sketch of this sector and to ask what, if anything, should concern us about the work they do. First she discusses the concerns of workers themselves, which often relate to the quality and accuracy of social data, and how a prevalent desire for numbers, emerging from conditions of datafication and more historical patterns of faith in the quantitative, limits the possibility of workers talking to clients about these concerns. Second, she focuses on ethical issues, highlighting how many decisions (about what is ethically off-limits, for example) are made on both ethical and economic grounds, and how ethical lines are not drawn in the same place for all workers.
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Notes
- 1.
Thirty-eight companies were identified and approached on the basis of online searches and offline contacts, of which 15 agreed to interview, but, in the case of one company, it was not possible to find a suitable time to carry out the interview.
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Kennedy, H. (2016). Commercial Mediations of Social Media Data. In: Post, Mine, Repeat. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-35398-6_5
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