Social Media Metadata: On Standards, Access, and Control

• In Event: Schemas, Graphs, Ontologies - II

Abstract

Metadata are standards that support the creation, access, management, and transmission of data collections across information systems. Increasingly, collected data and metadata from user engagement are becoming a core offering of the experience and services of social media platforms. For example, Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm and Twitter’s new personalized timeline driven towards events both leverage popular or current events or chronological posts. Instagram’s stories feature displays live streaming stories first. Across platforms we can see engagement activity, network counts, and flows of information, these signals not only give us measurements for understanding the users and the networks that they influence, these social media metadata can also provide information about the credibility, reliability, or trustworthiness of the information and content that users circulate within platforms. While traces of human behavior recorded as metadata are often hidden from users themselves, they are increasingly leveraged in social platform development and training data for advertising technology that increasingly underwrites the personalization of web experiences like online shopping, search, and news consumption. Metadata standards are always created with some intended future primary or secondary uses, even if those metadata applications may be unknown to system designers, users themselves, or manipulated by bad actors. This paper will discuss how social media metadata are semantic technologies formed through a constant churn of making and remaking data ontologies that spill across communities with competing views of social media data and its purposes.

Author

• Amelia Acker, The University of Texas at Austin