Bev Skeggs on social media siloing
"Most people,” says sociologist Bev Skeggs, “think they’re using Facebook to communicate with friends. Basically they’re using it to reveal how much they can be sold for, now and in the future, and how much their friends can be sold for.” This is what Bev Skeggs found while doing research on how networks were structuring or restructuring friendships. In this Social Science Bites Podcast she explains her research findings to interviewer David Edmond and highlights were all this data is going and what its being use for. What are the consequences and do we know how this will affect how research is done? Questions answered in the interview.
"Basically 90 percent of Facebook profit is made from advertising — selling your data to advertising companies so that they can place an advert on your browser... They probably have the greatest capacity to experiment with social data to see who we’re communicating with, how we’re communicating with them... (which is why) we really, really need to have some strict regulation” -Bev Skeggs
To listen to the full interview with Bev Skeggs click HERE.
Bev Skeggs, has led the sociology departments at Manchester University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and long looked at less explored vectors of inequality. She was the joint managing editor of the The Sociological Review for five years starting in 2011.
The podcast appears as part of the celebrated Social Science Bites podcast series which appears exclusively at the Social Science Space website. To see the entire catalog of past interviews with many of the planet’s most interesting social scientists, click HERE.
This blog post was written by Philip Patino employee at SAGE Publishing under PR Conventions and Social Science Department. As a SAGE employee he helps manage and edits the SAGE hosted sites MethodSpace and Social Science Space.