Author: Joanna Taylor, Claudia Pagliari
Publisher: SAGE Journals
Publication Year: 2017
Summary: The following article explores the ways data is being mined on social media platforms. Data representing people’s behavior, attitudes, feelings, and relationships are being mined from social media platforms and used for research. This can be ethically problematic, even when the data is in the public domain. Recent scandals show just how impactful this information is. The Cambridge Analytica Scandal was where a firm scraped the data of millions of Facebook users to make a model to predict how people would vote in the 2016 election. They collected network connections, likes, comments and then sold that information to political campaigns to be used for micro-targeted ad campaigns. Many experts credit Trump’s Facebook campaign to be the reason he won. The millions of people who had their information collected and sold had no idea until years after the election. Despite people’s Facebook profiles being public, it is still unethical for firms to collect this information without being transparent about what they are doing. Scandals like the Cambridge Analytica one has promopted data collection firms to be more transparent, but much work still needs to be done.