Social Media Analytics Case Study 1

Assessment Information
Subject Name: Social Media Analytics
AssessmentTitle: Case Study 1
Assessment Type: Group and Individual Case Study (In-Class)
Weighting: %
AssessmentDescription
Activity 1: Group Case Study (10%)
 Students form groups of 4-5 prior to week 6 (or are assigned to groups at the start of week
6).
 At the beginning of class (webinar) in Week 6 the lecturer will distribute a set ofcase study
questionsto each group(based on the attached reading).
 The questions will be based on Weeks 1 - 4 and on the attached reading.
 Your lecturer will email you the questions at the start of class.
 You will then be given 60 minutes to complete the questions in your groupin a zoom
breakout room.
 Youmust then submit your groupresponses via Turnitinand include the name and student ID
of your group members at the top of the page.
 The assessment is open book.
Activity 2: Individual Case Study (15%)
 The individual case study will take place after the group case study. The individual case
study consists of FOUR application questions based on the attached reading.
 The individual case studyis based on Weeks 1 - 4.
 Students will be given 60 minutes to individually complete the assessmenton camera
during the class

 Your lecturer will email you the questions at the commencement of the activity.
 To prepare, make sure you review workshop questions from Weeks 1 - 4.
 Youmust then submit your individualresponses via Turnitin.
 The assessment is open book.

AssessmentContent
The following reading will be used to answer the questions inActivities 1 and 2. Please make
sure you review this reading (carefully) when preparing for your assessment item in Week 6.
How Facebook stole the news business
(Opinion Piece)
Retraining news readers
When Facebook started, there was no feed. You browsed from profile to profile to check up on friends. News
Feed’s launch in 2006 retrained users to just go to the Facebook home page where everything would come to
you... on mobile with tiny screens, low quality app, poor connections, slow-loading sites, people seized upon
Facebook’s single app that pulled together content from everywhere. Facebook began to train us to keep
scrolling rather than struggle to bounce around.
In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant
Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites
when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the
publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as
publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their
advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.
...The problem is that for society as a whole, social media centralisation leads to a demonetization and
eventual defunding of some news publishers, content creators and utility providers while simultaneously
making them heavily reliant on Facebook. This gives Facebook the power to decide what types of content,
what topics, and what sources are important. Even if Facebook believes itself to be a neutral tech platform,
it implicitly plays the role of media company as its values define the feed. Having a single editor’s fallible
algorithms determine the news consumption of the wired world is a precarious situation.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/03/facebooks-siren-call/