Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and Understanding Social Media Beyond the Screen

One of the challenges many HE professionals face in classrooms geared towards teaching or learning about social media, is teaching apparently digitally savvy students who feel their intense familiarity with social media is the same as critical understanding. While some may indeed be critical and indeed, possess a sophisticated understanding of algorithms, privacy, and the complex structures of social media, many do not. As such, guiding learners to move beyond their experience of the newsfeed, stream, or front page can be tremendously challenging as well as tremendously rewarding.

This chapter examines one approach for dealing with this sometimes difficult teaching context, providing a broad overview of the growing importance for critical perspectives on social media. Beginning with an outline of the rich variety of student experiences, this chapter contextualizes some of the learning challenges I have encountered in my own classrooms while teaching social media, challenges which require an open classroom and a critical view of the idea of ‘digital natives’. This chapter also presents Facebook, particularly its interactions with Cambridge Analytica, as an ideal case for tackling the complexities of social media and pushing users beyond the social experience. The aim of this section is to examine the importance of personal data as the core business model of Facebook, and most mainstream or corporate social media.

Finally, this chapter includes three key exercises that can be used in classrooms to help learners to understand how Facebook works and some of what the Cambridge Analytica case reveals about social media. In sum, the purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the best ways to bring critical thinking into the experience of social media by providing a mix of theory and practical tasks so that learners can understand concepts of personal data collection and ‘surveillance capitalism’ in relation to their own Facebook accounts and social media use. The Cambridge Analytica case is particularly important and effective for engaging learners’ critical understanding of social media and moving their perspective beyond the screen.

This book can be freely downloaded from https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/945