By October 2021, the US social media giant Facebook Inc. had been dominating the social media market globally with the highest number of active users. It owned four of the biggest social media platforms—Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. However, the company’s history was marked by controversies ranging from ethical matters to social issues. The various crises it had faced to date included thousands of internal documents leaked by whistle-blower .....more

Maya Fonseca, the marketing analyst for video streaming service FilmCast, and her colleague Rupert Cruz had to interpret the results of a conjoint analysis conducted by their company. FilmCast was a large company, competing against Videosource and Webflickstream. The marketing analysts were debating whether it made sense to lower the price of their services and if the conjoint analysis results supported this idea.

In January 2020, the human resources (HR) head of MAGIS Infotech (MAGIS), a software solutions provider to banking and financial firms, was asked to come up with a set of new HR measures to resolve problems related to coordination between employees at MAGIS’s two locations—in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, and Coimbatore, India. The Abu Dhabi location had all of the client-facing roles and support functions such as HR and finance, whereas Coimbatore .....more

Alice Moore worked remotely as a full-time senior data associate for Bloom Inc., a global technology firm in the United States. The department in which Moore worked was restructured while she was on maternity leave; yet despite having a strong performance record, Moore received neither a promotion nor a pay increase, while some colleagues did. She returned from her maternity leave in June 2018, and regardless of more than a year of emails and meetings .....more

On the evening of June 4, 2021, the Nigerian government ordered the suspension of business operations for Twitter in Nigeria, accusing the social media company of spreading misinformation and fake news and allowing activities that could undermine the corporate existence of Nigeria. The suspension caused anger and outrage in Nigeria and sparked reactions around the world. Four months later, on October 1, 2021, the Nigerian government stated that it .....more

In 2018, the legacy business of Somedia AG (Somedia)—traditional media such as newspapers, radio, and TV—was in structural decline. While its business portfolio still delivered positive financial results, it became clear that this would only be the case for a few more years. Susanne Lebrument and Thomas Kundert, the two main figures in charge as this pivotal moment in the firm’s history emerged, tasked themselves with finding new business areas that .....more

In January 2021, the co-founder of Mystery Books Co. (Mystery Books) was evaluating the company’s 2020 performance under the leadership of his daughter as the new chief executive officer. His daughter had ambitions of securing Walmart Inc. as a key client, so the co-founder had promised her an additional performance bonus of 5 per cent of his 30 per cent ownership of common stock if she grew the company’s net income by 20 per cent over the previous .....more

In 2019, Netflix had 167 million subscribers globally and offered thousands of television shows and movies on its streaming application, a growing proportion of which it produced itself. Media giants, who for years had valued the relationship with Netflix because it provided an additional outlet, began to re-evaluate their own (make) versus contract (buy) distribution decision. Leveraging acquisitions, technology investments, and vast content libraries, .....more

The vice-president at Tencent LeXiang (LeXiang), the enterprise social networking platform of Tencent Holdings Limited (Tencent), had been overseeing the development of the platform from its inception. Since its official launch in 2017, LeXiang had been successfully adopted across a wide range of multinational corporations; it was also popular internally at Tencent, with many employees engaging with their fellow co-workers on the forums.The vice-president .....more

In February 2021, the Indian government announced new regulations to increase the accountability of social media companies for misusing their platforms in spreading fabricated news, misinformation, and obscene material. The new rules were not welcomed by some prominent social media companies, including Twitter. The giant microblogging network claimed that the new rules were designed to suppress freedom of speech among the citizens of India, one of .....more