Methodological Innovation in Precarious Spaces: The Case of Twitter

Abstract

The contemporary social media moment can be understood in terms of a ‘platform paradigm’ (Burgess, 2014) — one in which the private, interpersonal and public communication of a significant majority of users is being mediated via a small number of large proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and those platforms are redefining how such communication can be monetized and analysed. In this current conjuncture, the data generated either directly or indirectly by user practices and interactions are at the centre of such platforms’ business models — user data analytics are used to power advertising and personalize newsfeeds, and user-created social media content is in itself a commodity to be mined commercially for business insights, public relations crisis aversion and even stock market prediction. Alongside such commercially motivated developments, the social and behavioural sciences as well as the digital humanities have been developing ever more sophisticated and large-scale methods for analysing social media data, often motivated by different questions but relying on similar tools to access and analyse data as the commercial players, and thereby operating in ways that entangle scientific practice with the evolving markets in user data. To complicate matters, as the power and uses of social data analytics have grown, so too has the social anxiety around surveillance, exploitation and user agency.