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Journalism

Snurb — Thursday 12 September 2024 14:51

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

There’s rather a lot going on in Australian policy-making around social media, most of it thoroughly disconnected from evidence, scholarship, and sanity – and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on some of these developments in future posts, too. For the moment, though, here is an update on some ongoing work surrounding the renewed controversies about Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), a thoroughly misshapen piece of legislation which sought to force major digital media platforms to hand over some of their revenue to cross-subsidise struggling commercial news media operators.

The inherent flaws in this approach led to …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 20:08

Nostalgic Anticipation of the Future of Social Media in the Coverage of Emerging Platforms

Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | SM&S 2024 |

I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do …

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Snurb — Thursday 18 July 2024 01:31

Patterns of Asymmetrical Polarisation in Brazil

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Facebook | SM&S 2024 |

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Felipe Soares, whose focus is on asymmetric polarisation on Facebook in Brazil. He begins by noting the difficulty in defining polarisation, given the wide range of definitions available in the literature, and points to our work at QUT in developing the concept of destructive polarisation as a way to determine whether the polarisation that we might observe in any given context is in fact a problem at all.

Further, polarisation is often observed to be asymmetric, with one side of politics considerably more extreme than the other. This …

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Snurb — Saturday 13 July 2024 13:33

'If you don't know, vote no': Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation in the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum in Australia (IAMCR 2024)

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | IAMCR 2024 |

IAMCR 2024

‘If you don’t know, vote no’: Symptoms of Destructive Polarisation in the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum in Australia

Axel Bruns, Tariq Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, Samantha Vilkins, Katharina Esau, and Laura Vodden

  • 1 July 2024 – Paper presented at the IAMCR 2024 conference, Christchurch

Presentation Slides

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Snurb — Saturday 6 July 2024 17:40

Meta, the News Media Bargaining Code, and the Selective Innumeracy of Australian News Industry Leaders

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook |

Now that the Australian federal parliament’s Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society has commenced its hearings, the question of Australian policy towards social media platforms has gained in prominence yet again. The Select Committee is conducting a somewhat poorly defined, multi-issue inquiry into several loosely linked topics, and part of its focus is on the future of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) – a policy which seeks to redirect some of the substantial revenues that digital media platforms generate from online advertising to the nation’s financially struggling, often unprofitable news publishers.

There are some serious issues …

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Snurb — Thursday 4 July 2024 09:38

How News on Twitch Challenges the Boundaries of Journalism

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Streaming Media | IAMCR 2024 |

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Nicole Stewart. Her interest is in the presence of journalism in the informational backwaters of streaming platform Twitch; what functions do its streamers play in the delivery of news?

Twitch is not a conventional news provider, but news is nonetheless present there: it provides a platformed information space for news content, too. The quality of news has always been contingent, dynamic, and contested, and Twitch should therefore not be dismissed out of hand as a space for the news – however, journalistic boundary work continues to place news on Twitch …

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Snurb — Thursday 4 July 2024 09:36

Good Journalism for a Post-Growth Society

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2024 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yu Ling, whose focus is on news acceleration in China. This relates to the idea that news time in journalism has accelerated; this is part of the broader social acceleration in late modernity, and may be in conflict with the human pursuit of a good life: it threatens the resonance relationship between humans and the world they live in.

Journalism has a role to play in this; social mediatisation means that journalism has replaced religion and contributes to alienation and relationlessness. By contrast, good journalism should serve as an information intermediary …

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Snurb — Thursday 4 July 2024 09:35

A Poetic Inquiry into Journalists’ Experiences of Covering the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | New Media Arts | IAMCR 2024 |

The second speaker at this IAMCR 2024 session is Lisa Waller, whose focus is on how Australian journalists have been converging institutionalised child sexual abuse in regional Australia, following a Royal Commission into such abuses. This takes the form of a poetic inquiry, which builds on transdisciplinary collaboration between journalism research and creative practice and enables a focus on the vivid details of the situated practices of journalism as they are lived in real life.

The work builds on 16 interviews with well-established and emerging journalists who covered the victim-survivor testimony of individuals in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat …

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Snurb — Thursday 4 July 2024 09:33

Patterns in the Coverage of the Norwegian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | IAMCR 2024 |

And the final day at IAMCR 2024 starts for me with a session on journalism research. The first presenter is the wonderful Eli Skogerbø, whose focus here is on the media coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the injustices perpetrated against the indigenous Sámi people in Norway. This work emerges from the Trucom research project, which importantly also involved Sámi researchers.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Norway operated from 2018 to 2023, and investigated the ‘Norwegianisation’ policies towards the indigenous Sámi people as well as the minority Kvens (or Norwegian Finns) and Forest Finns. Its explicit aim …

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Snurb — Wednesday 3 July 2024 15:49

No Backfire Effects from Factual Corrections to Misinformation in Taiwan

Politics | Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | IAMCR 2024 |

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Victoria Chen, whose interest is in the influence of political misinformation in Taiwan. There are frequent presidential, parliamentary, and mid-term elections in Taiwan, and political misinformation about political parties is common. This manipulates public opinion, and can lead to polarisation and unconscious bias – the key question here is how people believe in and deal with such misinformation.

Fact-checking is one response to this, but can also produce backfire effects or a continued influence effect of misinformation. Backfire effects here mean that correction of misinformation only strengthens the convictions of those …

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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