There has been a data rush in the past decade brought about by online communication and, in particular, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others), which promises a new age of digital enlightenment. But social data is compromised: it is being seized by specific economic interests, it leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between research and the public good, and it fosters new forms of control and surveillance. Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data explores how we perform critical research within a compromised social data framework. The expert, international lineup of contributors explores the limits and challenges of social data research in order to invent and develop new modes of doing public research. At its core, this collection argues that we are witnessing a fundamental reshaping of the social through social data mining.

From the social media-based 2008 Obama election campaign to the civic protest and political revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring, the past few years have been marked by a widespread and complex shift in the political landscape, as the rise of participatory platforms - such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs - have multiplied the venues for political communication and activism. This book explores the emergence of a permanent campaign - the need for constant readiness - on networked communication platforms, focusing on political moments, crises and elections in Canada, the U.S.A., and Australia. The book chapters investigate the proliferation of new political actors and communicators: political bloggers, advocacy groups, diverse publics, and political party staff as they engage in political maneuvers across participatory platforms. With in-depth analyses of some of the most well-known participatory media today, this book offers a critical assessment of the constant efforts at managing the plurality of voices that characterize contemporary politics.

More important than flagging things "really fake" is to understand why they are dismissed as fake The new truth is the one that circulates: digital truth emerges from lists, databases, archives, and conditions of storage. Multiple truths may be activated through search, link, and retrieve queries. Alexandra Juhasz, Ganaele Langlois, and Nishant Shah respond by taking up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing. Their feminist digital methods allow considerations of internet things through alternative networked internet time: slowing down to see, honor, and engage with our past; invoking indeterminacy as a human capacity that lets multiple truths commingle on a page or in a body; and saving the truths of ourselves and our others differently from the corporate internet's perpetual viral movement. Writing across their own shared truisms, actors, and touchstones, the authors propose creative tactics, theoretical overtures, and experimental escape routes built to a human scale as ways to regain our capacities to know and tell truths about ourselves.

There has been a data rush in the past decade brought about by online communication and, in particular, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others), which promises a new age of digital enlightenment. But social data is compromised: it is being seized by specific economic interests, it leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between research and the public good, and it fosters new forms of control and surveillance. Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data explores how we perform critical research within a compromised social data framework. The expert, international lineup of contributors explores the limits and challenges of social data research in order to invent and develop new modes of doing public research. At its core, this collection argues that we are witnessing a fundamental reshaping of the social through social data mining.