Social Media, Big Data, and Critical Marketing

Social media and big data have become ubiquitous keywords in everyday life. The term ‘social media’ is commonly used for social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Weibo), blogs (e.g., WordPress, Tumblr), micro-blogs (e.g., X/Twitter), short form video platforms (e.g. TikTok, Snapchat), user-generated content-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram), or wikis (e.g., Wikipedia) ( Fuchs, 2017b , 2024 , chapter 2). Big data refers to the collection and analysis of data in such vast quantities that humans are incapable of processing them – only algorithms can ( Fuchs, 2017b , 2024 , chapter 2). There are diverse sources of big data, one example being credit and debit card transactions. So, the term ‘big data’ is not limited to social media. At the same time, given that Meta platforms and apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) have about 3.4 billion daily active users 1 and Google processes more than 1.2 trillion searches per year on average, 2 these two US Internet companies are probably the largest data processors in the world. This tells of an inherent link between big data and social media. While social media characterize the techno-social systems enabling human interaction on the Internet, big data are the digital results of human activities. Google, Facebook, and other online platforms tend to store all data and meta-data for long periods of time and therefore require huge server farms consisting of numerous supercomputers.