Big Data ethics in the news media

This research highlights a few perspectives from which the global news media have been reporting on the topic of big data in connection with novel ethical issues. It observes that the overview of the big data debate in the news media brings out an uneven landscape, with recent coverage showing a marked discontinuity since the end of March 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Disrupting the largely unchallenged storytelling about big data as most progressive and desirable in all sectors of society – from business to healthcare – the exposure of privacy violation appears to have raised public perception of contradictions in the use of big data and generated a peak of awareness about ethical breaches and loss of control over digital information. The emergence of widespread criticism about data misuse marks a turning point in the rhetoric of big data and its impact on social imaginaries that a linguistic and discursive investigation of the news media manages to capture and describe in its unfolding.