Diskurssianalyysi Helsingin Sanomien Cambridge Analytica -skandaalin uutisoinnista

This master’s thesis examines Cambridge Analytica scandal and by using discourse analysis aims to find out how Helsingin Sanomat describes the scandal in its news articles and what kind of discourses emerges from those articles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was disclosed in 2018 when leading news agencies around the world published news about it. In the center of the storm was a company called Cambridge Analytica which had collected and taken advantage of millions of users’ personal data. The literature review consists of four chapters. The first one concerns the scandal itself, proceeding with own chapters for the following topics: New technologies’ influence on media environment, Information warfare and Online privacy. Each of these chapters gives a wider understanding of the phenomenon and supports in understanding the results of this study. The material for these chapters has been collected from different scientifical articles, books, and conference papers. In total the material consisted of 96 news articles which were analyzed using discourse analysis as a method. As the results of the analysis, four main discourses were identified: user data exploitation, disregard, influencing and privacy. First of the discourses, user data exploitation, constructs reality that huge amount of user data can be gathered online without people knowing about that or without their acceptance. The second discourse, disregard, constructs reality in a way that Facebook is careless about its users’ privacy and protecting their personal data. The third discourse, influencing, constructs reality in a way that services such as Facebook and its platform enables effective influencing on masses or on a targeted user. The fourth discourse, privacy, constructs reality in a way that privacy policies are hard to understand, and users are not aware how their data is handled and used.