New Uses of Social Media Metadata in Critical Research

The next paper in this iCS Symposium session is by Amelia Acker and Joan Donovan, and focusses on new approaches to gathering metadata from social media platforms without relying on Application Programming Interfaces. Indeed, platform providers are generally unable to predict all of the ways in which users, including researchers, are likely to engage with their platforms, and this leaves loopholes that researchers are able to exploit.

At the present moment, with API access increasingly limited, we clearly need new methods. Part of the issue here is in how the platforms themselves classify their own data through metadata; media manipulation occurs when metadata are gamed, exploited, break, or drift within the platforms – when the platforms’ own systems are not up to the task they are designed to perform.

Metadata generally name, order, and identify data, and the more complex data systems have become, the higher are the rates of abstraction and obscurity in such metadata. Metadata have their own hidden social life, then: they advance specific worldviews, and sustain particular structures of control and power; this is because they attempt to capture categories from everyday life that are by default fuzzy and imprecise.

Such issues with metadata can be used in data craft: practices that create, rely, or play with the proliferation of data on social media by engaging with new computational and algorithmic mechanisms of organisation and classification. Such practices of data craft are exploited with various degrees of skill by media manipulators, but can also be traced and examined in critical research.

This manipulation may draw on content from Web archives, and there is therefore also a greater need to develop appropriate frameworks and protocols for the archives that we as researchers ourselves create – there is much more work to be done here.