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Educators increasingly teach with social media in varied ways, but they may do so without considering the ways in which social media corporations profit from their uses or compromise transparency, equity, health, safety, and democracy through the design of platforms. There is a lack of scholarship that addresses the curricular topics that educators might investigate to teach about social media platforms and the potential challenges they pose for education and society. In this article, we draw on sociotechnical theories that conceive of social media as microsystems to understand the relationship between users, education, and social media companies. We identify and describe five topics concerning social media design that educators can consider and investigate with students in a variety of settings: user agreements and use of data; algorithms of oppression, echo, and extremism; distraction, user choice, and access for nonusers; harassment and cyberbullying; and gatekeeping for accurate information. In each case, we suggest curricular possibilities for teaching about social media platforms that draw from intersections of curriculum, media, and educational studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has attracted considerable scholarly interest. Previous research has demonstrated the need for a more comprehensive overview of social media research across diverse disciplines. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the scope of social media integration across educational settings and how it relates to research in other academic disciplines. Harnessing the search terms of previous literature reviews, this study collected data on 80,267 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection database using search terms that were based on previous literature reviews. The data were analyzed using a combination of co-citation and bibliometric analyses via a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerned with social media, both as a transversal topic and within the educational sector. We are also able to show a range of topical domains in which the vast majority of research on social media is conducted. Our findings have practical implications for scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars can benefit from these types of analyses to identify authors and topic clusters that might otherwise have been unrecognized. Similarly, practitioners can benefit from this overview of the current "state-of-the-art" on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]