ABSTRACT
Social media and big data have become ubiquitous keywords in everyday life. Critical marketing studies are based on the insight that "marketing has devoted too much attention to refining itself as an instrumental science, with the corollary emphasis on the production of knowledge for the 'marketing organization', not for wider stakeholders". This chapter makes us to critically understand social media and big data's political economy. It outlines key classical texts, contemporary texts, and future research directions that can help us achieve the goal. The chapter focuses on the analysis of social media's political economy based on various critical theory approaches. It utilizes classical concepts such as the audience commodity, audience labor, and commodity fetishism to show that critical analysis of advertising and targeted advertising needs to look at both economic and ideological dimensions.
