The Spider’s Web of Third-Party Web Applications

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Aske Kammer. He begins by noting that there is a resource exchange between media organisations and third party platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By embedding social media sharing tools or topical advertisements on their own pages, media organisations provide a window for third-party data capture in exchange for the platforms’ services.

For the user, this manifests in multiple server calls as they access the media organisation’s content; in addition to the media organisation, their devices also access various content elements from a range of other platforms. This is not usually transparent for the user, and it remains unclear to what extent resource exchanges take place between the different stakeholders in these processes, and between which stakeholders.

In the case of news apps for smartphones, for example, what networks of resource exchanges between providers can be identified? Aske’s project examined 25 news apps for smartphones from a range of providers in six countries; he used the Debookee tool to document all the server calls from a ‘clean’ iPhone that resulted from the first article being accessed after installing the apps for the first time.

All the news apps examined engaged in the use of tools from third parties. The German Handelsblatt generated the largest number of additional calls (49 in 2017); the Portuguese RTP generated the least (8 in 2017). These calls are distributed across a considerable number of parties, but leaders include Apple (this was on an iPhone), Doubleclick, Google Syndication, Google Analytics, Facebook, and most of the leading services were owned by Google owner Alphabet; the company holds a fairly dominant position in this market.