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Kelsey Setla
Sherrin Frances
English 212
30 March 2015
Transforming the Role of Social Media Sites: For Better or for Worse
It is official: technology has invaded lives around the globe, for better or for worse, in
more ways than one. In fact, in 2013, more than 83% of households documented in the United
States Census alone reported ownership of at least one computer and these numbers continue to
rise (Census). As technology becomes increasingly more important in everythingincluding
business, education, and social interactionheftier amounts of data arise much more quickly
from the constant use of internet and technology around the world. This instant data collection
allows online companies to acquire more information about their clients than ever before. These
insurmountably large quantities of information are now being referred to as "big data." As stated
in Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, "Big data refers to
our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw
sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it." When studying big data, it is important to
understand exactly what big data is, how it is being applied, the implications it has on society,
and ways to control how big data can effect society.
For example, social media sites analyze the posts users share to project specific
characteristics about users that can result in economic gains. In other words, sites like Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram are looking at what users put on their sites to project the type of people
their users spend time with, what kinds of things they look at, and how they view different issues
in order to sell this information to other companies who use the data to decide issues pertaining
to physical and mental health and, even, credit. A prime example of this type of datafication lies
within the realm of Twitter. Not only has Twitter developed a way to analyze users' tweets to
decipher their mood at different times of day, they have also developed systems that use these

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tweets to project the state of your healthboth mental and physicalwhich allows companies
who buy this information to project health care plans, credit scores, and much more (Big Data,
91-94). Twitter limits its posts to only 140 characters; however, in just those 140 characters,
Twitter analysts can use 33 different items including background wallpaper, geolocation,
language, emoji's, and number and type of followers to project a user's mood at any given time.
In fact, in 2011, a study of 509 million tweets from about 2 million people in 84 countries
showed that peoples' moods follow similar daily and weekly patterns (Big Data, 93). The image
below is an example of the way that Twitter analyzes its users' moods throughout the day to

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pinpoint individual, state, and national emotions per minute (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A time lapse of American users' moods according to Twitter posts in 2010.
Twitter has also used this information to project health and social interaction. Using the
types advertising that users view most often, things they search for and share, and the types of
things that users buy on the internet, social media siteslike Facebookcan pretty accurately

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predict a person's health. This information can be sold to other companies, for example,
Prudential Insurance, to help create insurance plans that are less costly to the company and
require no health based indicators such as blood and urine samples. In addition, based on the
types of relationships that users have with one another, Facebook can also predict how
responsible users are in relation to finances, which allows them to predict individual's average
credit score, annually.
These new advances in the types of things that social media can predict have huge
impacts on individuals and companies alike. For companies, this means that more information is
available than ever before; however, the availability of such vast amounts of information violates
the privacy of individuals. For example, Prudential Insurance pays Facebook millions each year
to have rights to the data that Facebook unveils through big data. Prudential can, then, use your
followers list, posts, and other such information to come up with a quote for your insurance. The
more physically and emotionally fit a user seems to be, according to the data Facebook collects,
the better health care plans a user might be eligible for. This way of creating insurance plans cuts
the cost down from $125 to about $5 and allows companies to avoid wasting their time and
energy on individual research and medical tests. Nevertheless, it feels like a violation of privacy
to those who use sites like Facebook and it also creates a state in which the data determines an
individuals' positive criteria based on past searches and posts, and not on their future
characteristic improvements and personality. Susan Etlinger, a speaker at the TED Talks
convention in 2009, asserts that data is not just numbers and that people are the ones who give
meaning to the numbers. This is exactly what these companies miss out on when they base their
perceptions of people strictly on the numerical information presented in the big data they
purchase.

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Even though the ability of certain companies to have access to what feels like private
information is unsettling, there is one huge factor that most individuals neglect to take into
account before they get "bent out of shape" over social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter,
sharing their information. This factor lies within the terms and agreements page that every single
user is required to accept before being allowed to use whatever software they are trying to
access. The first use of terms and agreements online was in 2009, when the government
instructed websites to include a terms and agreements page in their software. Terms and
agreements started out as a way to protect users, but have since transformed into complicated
contracts that users cannot understand (Dickerson). Everyone who has used a computer has been
confronted with a page like this. It is tons of pages of scholarly, legal jargon in tiny print that no
one has the time or the motivation to read. Nonetheless, that tiny, hard-to-understand print is
exactly the reason that user information is up for sale. When users do not take the time to read
and understand the terms and agreements, they are selling their personal opinions, beliefs, and
private information to data analysts trying to turn a profit.
In conclusion, every touch of a key, click of a mouse, and post of a thought is undergoing
immense analyzing from social media sites. These siteslike Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
have gone from simply being places for individuals to connect and interact with one another to
immense databases to study individuals' behaviors, thoughts, and even health. Big data has given
companies the ability to collect tremendous amounts of data, quickly, in order to analyze it and
discover some pretty profound things. Although big data has given the world some pretty
interesting capabilities, it still presents issues in the face of security and privacy for not only
individuals using social media, but those who buy the information from social media sites. The
only way to control this type of data is to understand what it is about, how it is changing society,

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and to always know what you are allowing to happen when you press accept on the terms and
agreements.

Works Cited
"Census: Computer and Internet Use." Computer and Internet Use Main. United States Census
Bureau, 2014. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.
Dickerson, Nathan. "Social Media Terms of Service Agreements and State Government."
Knowledge Center. The Council of State Governments, 9 Mar. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
Etlinger, Susan. "What Do We Do with All of This Big Data?" TED Talks. TED, Sept. 2014.
Web. 25 Mar. 2015.
Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform
How We Live, Work, and Think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Print.
Phillips, Tom. Twitter Mood Map. Digital image. Metro News. Metro News, 30 July 2010. Web.
23 Mar. 2015.