The Social Data School is an application-only online intensive teaching programme structured around the life-cycle of a digital research project, covering principles of research design, data collection, cleaning and preparation, methods of analysis and visualisation, and data management and preservation practices. The Social Data School includes modules exploring the challenges to data protection principles in a world where networked surveillance is fast becoming the norm. We will also analyse the social and cultural impact of recent advances in machine learning-driven systems for classifying and generating images and texts and discuss and deploy data-intensive methods for analysing disinformation on social media platforms.