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Assignment 1 - Ethical and Societal Issues (Access To Information)

Businesses are increasingly analyzing social media data from networks like Facebook and Twitter to gain consumer insights. They monitor posts to understand public sentiment about products and address negative publicity. While this helps businesses, some question if it is ethical for social networks to sell user data without explicit consent. Systems that track social media use artificial intelligence to identify relevant comments among billions of posts and generate reports, though sifting through unstructured data remains a challenge. The owners of social networks plan to profit from the valuable consumer information shared on their platforms.

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Kween Phoebe
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61 views1 page

Assignment 1 - Ethical and Societal Issues (Access To Information)

Businesses are increasingly analyzing social media data from networks like Facebook and Twitter to gain consumer insights. They monitor posts to understand public sentiment about products and address negative publicity. While this helps businesses, some question if it is ethical for social networks to sell user data without explicit consent. Systems that track social media use artificial intelligence to identify relevant comments among billions of posts and generate reports, though sifting through unstructured data remains a challenge. The owners of social networks plan to profit from the valuable consumer information shared on their platforms.

Uploaded by

Kween Phoebe
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Who Is Interested in Your Social Network Updates?

would Twitter, a service with apparently no business model,


be worth over a billion dollars? Twitter’s goal is to grow to
More than two-thirds of the world’s online population use one billion members and provide interested parties with
social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to the pulse of the planet.
stay in touch with friends. It is likely that you are one of
them. In 2008, social networks became more popular than How do users feel about their “personal” comments being
e-mail, with 66.8 percent of Internet users accessing ember harvested to make billions for Internet companies? With
communities. Most members of social networks use a social network growth rates in 2009 ranging from 228
posting feature that allows them to share their day-to-day percent for Facebook to 1,382 percent for Twitter, users are
thoughts and activities with their circle of friends. Facebook either unaware or unconcerned. Regardless of what users
calls these postings “updates,” while Twitter calls them think, it is likely that businesses will increasingly analyze the
“tweets.” Most users do not realize the value of their continuous flow of data over social networks to generate
comments, updates, or tweets to people outside their insights they can use.
circle.

Businesses are flocking to social networks to harvest Questions:


consumer sentiment for use in guiding product
development. They are also watching social networks to 1. Do you think it is ethical for social networks to sell
confront negative publicity. The broad scale use of social access to user information to businesses for market
networks and the careful analysis of billions of messages research and other uses? Why or why not?
have made it possible to collect public sentiment and build 2. What service does the monitoring of social media
customer relations in a manner never done before. But ultimately provide for consumers?
sifting through the babble to discover comments of interest 3. What competitive advantage does the monitoring of
is challenging. social media provide to companies that invest in it?
4. Why is the monitoring of social media considered a
A number of information system companies have sprung up CBIS?
to provide products designed to monitor social media.
Companies such as Alterian, Radian6, Attensity, Visible
Technologies, Conversion, and Nielsen Online provide social
media monitoring systems for businesses and
organizations. As a young technology, there is no standard
approach to social media monitoring. Similar to a search
engine, the systems typically traverse the continuous
streams of comments in social networks, looking for key
terms related to specified products. Artificial intelligence
(AI) techniques that automate the interpretation of user
comments make it possible to quickly identify comments of
particular interest. Ultimately, they generate analytic and
performance reports for the human expert to evaluate.
Systems that monitor social media enable useful
information to be drawn from billions of seemingly
mundane and unrelated messages.

Monitoring social media can focus on brand reputation


management, public relations, or even market research.
Companies such as Comcast, a major communications
company, hire full-time social media experts who interact
with customers online to address problems and complaints.
For example, if you complain about Comcast service on
Twitter, you might be contacted by a Comcast employee
offering to help you.

The social network service owners are well aware of the


value of the information that flows over their networks.
Most of them intend to build their business through the
comments and attention of their members. Whether
through targeted ads or selling access to user data, social
networks can become very lucrative businesses. Why else

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