Snurb's blog

After a brief excursion to Helsinki for a workshop and a guest lecture, I have made my way to Ljubljana for the great biennial European communication conference, ECREA 2024. After the opening ceremony and a pipe organ performance (!) of Laibach’s “The Whistleblowers”, we start now with a keynote by Vesna Leskošek, addressing the conference theme of ‘communication and social (dis)order’.

She begins by introducing the idea of the welfare state, as a concept that may be in decline in the present time. But the welfare state maintains social order, social structures, and social institutions; it was one of the great developments in post-war Europe, and critical to the maintenance of peace. It built on precedents such as social insurance policies in early twentieth-century Germany, and developed in divergent ways under the differing regimes of in western and eastern Europe during the second half of that century.

Critically, the welfare state also regulates markets, reflecting a commitment to principles of social justice and equality; this also means that it assumes responsibility for those who are unable to achieve such social justice and equality by themselves. It builds on insurance, solidarity, and direct and indirect services, and provides these through the redistribution of taxes. In spite of common American misunderstandings of the welfare state as a socialist project, it is a critical component of capitalist systems.

The welfare state ensures social peace: it is a compromise between employers and the labour force. Its opponents are typically both liberal and conservative forces who see this as placing restrictions on the free market, and thereby holding back economic development as well as eroding individual responsibility. These arguments deny the morality of welfare recipients.

Modern followers of these arguments included politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, who saw those relying on the welfare state as abusing state support; these arguments gradually led to the erosion of broad public support for the welfare state, and the establishment of mainstream political efforts to dismantle welfare state regulations. This reduction of welfare state frameworks has led to an increase in the exploitation of labour forces and a reduction of protection for vulnerable groups.

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed at Anchor.fm so you don’t miss further updates.

Up first was my appearance in episode five of Read Them Sideways, where I spoke to Sebastian about the recent closure of Meta’s data access platform CrowdTangle. This is a major blow to public-interest critical scrutiny of what happens on Facebook and Instagram, even though Meta has now launched the broadly similar Meta Content Library as a replacement – but while the MCL certainly looks like it will provide similar data to scholarly researchers who manage to gain access to it, it substantially reduces the range of users of these data (especially excluding journalists and other independent watchdogs, at least for now), and so far seems more difficult to work with than CrowdTangle was. We’ll see how things develop from here…

Just a few days later I also spoke to the well-known Australian technology journalist Stilgherrian, as part of his long-running The 9pm Edict podcast. We had a long, wide-ranging, and very enjoyable discussion about a wide range of topics including the current Australian federal government’s energetic if generally ill-informed actionism on social media policy, the decline of Xitter, the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, and various other current issues – just listen to the whole thing already. Stilgherrian has also compiled a list of further background information on his site, to go with the podcast itself.

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 Meta banning all news content from Facebook in Australia for just over a week after the NMBC was introduced in February 2021, and it took some urgent negotiations and what amounted to a significant backdown by the then government to resolve the situation at least for the time being; but with those temporary solutions now reaching the end of their timeframe the discussion about the NMBC has flared up again. Meanwhile, ill-advised by some of the same people who constructed the NMBC in Australia, Canada passed a very similar law in 2023, and as a result has seen a permanent ban of news content from Canadian Facebook since August 2023 – with all the substantial negative consequences that the absence of news from what remains a very important social media platform was always going to produce.

Recently , I was asked to contribute a brief overview of the NMBC saga in Australia to a public event organised by the United States’ Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), and because of time differences made that contribution in the form of a pre-recorded video statement – the video as well as the full text of that statement are below. Much of this also builds on our QUT Digital Media Research Centre submission to the Australian federal parliament’s current Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society, which (amongst an incoherent laundry list of other issues) also addresses the future of the NMBC. I led the development of section two of our submission, which works through the flaws of the NMBC and proposes saner solutions for subsidising quality Australian journalism than the NMBC could ever hope to be. (In fact, I also discuss this in a recent episode of the DMRC’s new podcast series Read Them Sideways.)

But back to the CCIA event: here is the video of my contribution, and the full text of what I had to say. At the bottom of this post, I’ll also embed a recording of the full CCIA discussion.

Invited contribution to the discussion "The Impact of Link Taxes on News and Beyond: Lessons from Australia and Canada", hosted by the US Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), 10 September 2024 (https://ccianet.org/event/impact-link-taxes-lessons-from-australia-canada/).

The final speaker in this final Social Media & Society 2024 session is my QUT colleague Kate O’Connor Farfan, whose interest is in the use of semiotics in combination with Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the study of polarisation. NLP comes with a very diverse range of applications, variously examining superficial and structural aspects at differing levels of complexity.

And the final session at this excellent Social Media & Society 2024 conference starts with Kaspar Beelen, Katherine Ireland, and Tim Samples, presenting a longitudinal analysis of changes to platform Terms of Use. How have such terms changed over time, and how might we quantify and visualise such change? Are such contracts more plastic – mutable – than other types of contract, and are there specific times when they changed substantially?

And my own paper on ten years of the #auspol hashtag on Twitter is next at Social Media & Society 2024. Here are the slides:

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jessica Crosby, whose focus is on Tumblr. She is interest in online audiencing through Tumblr, especially amongst millennial audiences; platforms such as this enable a performance of the self, but are also complicated by a context collapse between performance and private interactions.

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.

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Dom Carlon, whose focus is on governance of bots by bots, and inter-bot communication more broadly, on Reddit. Bots are often understood based on how they communicate with humans, and there are often seen as a problem or nuisance, but bots have always also communicated with other bots; this is sometimes by design and sometimes by chance (as bots have unplanned encounters with other bots online).

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Abby Youran Qin, whose focus is on affective polarisation. She references the famous Adamic & Glance study that showed strong homophily between Republican and Democrat bloggers, respectively, and suggests that this can also be seen as an indication of affective polarisation.