In this bankruptcy, Martin and Dwyer investigate the ambiguities of social media signs and the problem of relying on them to check the price of journalistic labour and merchandise. They chart the increase of the metadata commodity, a new register of advice commodification, which underpins the platform economic system and its particular types of capital accumulation, market organisation and competitors. They then discover how social media analytics are created and what they purport to show, interrogating the elements that social structures track in news use. In critiquing the accuracy of these metrics, they invite reporters to become more literate about the building, operation and uses of social metrics so they can more quite simply question their application to news creation.
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