Facebook and Privacy: Proactive and Anticipatory Corporate Political Strategies

This dissertation explores how Facebook uses both Anticipatory and Proactive Corporate Political strategies to disseminate their view of privacy. It begins by introducing the various academic literatures that have discussed corporate political activity. Second, it highlights the diverse political strategies that corporations deploy. Third, it discusses the tactics, which are used within these overarching political strategies. Fourth, it briefly touches upon two important concepts, namely the Public Issue Lifecycle and the corporation’s social and political context. This is then followed by a section detailing the method, which spearheaded the research and the model that was developed to help analyse Facebook’s political behaviour. After this, the dissertation looks at social media focusing on social networks and in turn Facebook. Next, the contested issue of privacy is examined and how Facebook views privacy. The analysis section follows which details the tactics associated with both an Anticipatory corporate political strategy and a Proactive corporate political strategy. Finally, the dissertation is completed with a discussion of the results garnered from the analysis and a summation of the main findings in the conclusion section