Social Intelligence Stories that Caught Our Attention: Volume Thirty-Six

This week we’re exploring regulation, censorship, fooling ad tracking with multiple complex personalities, new insights and emerging methods with the social intelligence stories that caught our attention.

Regulator Ofcom to Have More Powers Over UK Social Media

New powers will be given to the watchdog Ofcome to force social media firms to act over harmful content. Until now, social media networks have been largely self-regulating but critics say independent rules are needed to keep people safe. It is still unclear over penalties Ofcom will be able to enforce to target violence, cyber-bullying, and child abuse. With more powers being given to regulators in social media, how much longer do we have in the data world before regulation is enforced?

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Censorship on Reddit

For a while there have been murmurings of Reddit comments being censored. In a new video clip the Reddit CTO speaks about Reddit struggling with their positioning in the industry and its identity as a social network. He also talks about how to describe Reddit and the challenges of this. How do you classify Reddit as a data source? When you explore Reddit, do you consider the motivations to post there or do you just take the data and run?

We all know Reddit conversations can get a bit salty in comparison to some of the other platforms. This shows that we really need to start thinking about the data sources and behaviours surrounding them.

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Young People Are Fooling Site Tracking in Advertising Into Sport

Ever felt creeped out by the ads you are being served? I know I do sometimes… This article is about a group of teenagers fooling Instagram. They know they can’t hide their data footprints, but they are banning together to leave hundreds of footprints behind to confuse trackers. This can obviously have an impact on our analysis when understanding audiences.

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To Make the Most Out of Data Brands Need to Use it to Derive New Insights

Across on Medium, Guy Kedar explores the need for brands to use data to derive new insights. You might be thinking duh?! But, so often data is used to confirm existing thinking, people are not open to new insights…

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GRIT Insights Practice Sneak Peek: Adoption of Emerging Methods

Across at Greenbook, Ray Poynter gives a sneak peek into the upcoming insights practice Edition of their GRIT report. He explores the emergence of new methodologies, and the adoption of methodologies by buyers and suppliers alike. Good news for social intelligence, social media analytics ranks number three, and text analytics ranks number 2. The skills to analyse social data are also transferrable to analyse other written communication or voice of customer sources… Good news.

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