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From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.

From here, it turned into a hybrid online and offline campaign; it was endorsed by far-right celebrities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and …

The second speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Tommy S. Yotes, whose focus is on the 2024 Indonesian presidential election, which took place in February. Indonesian politics often features hoaxes distributed through social media platforms, and scare campaigns repeating to Chinese-Indonesians and Chinese influence on Indonesia are common; they make for easy scapegoats in times of civil unrest.

Much of this is expressed through social media memes that promote hoaxes. Hoaxes themselves are not new in political disinformation, and predate the Internet by many decades; online hoaxes effectively exploit the affordances of digital media, however, and represent memetic …

I’m chairing the next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference, which is on disinformation and trolling. We start with Hanyu Zhang, with a paper on the Donald Trump assassination attempt and its discussion on the Chinese platform Douyin. In China, there has been a strong focus to ‘positive energy’ on social media, promoting core ideological values and nationalist narratives. This has also been applied to discussions of Donald Trump, where responding narratives highlighted both the challenges to China and the country’s resilience in the face of such challenges.

Douyin, whose international spinoff is TikTok, has been a crucial space for …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Kirsty Anderson, whose interest is in how younger and older news audiences use the news differently. Interviews with news users bear this out: for younger users news is whatever pops up on their social media feeds, while older users might regard only fully fact-checked information as news.

News is critical to societies, of course, and journalism has a special status in terms of news. But this is under threat as news is now available anywhere, any time, and also from sources other than conventional journalism. This is also expressed in …

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Caroline Fisher and Renee Barnes, whose interest is in news avoidance. They begin by noting the global rise in news avoidance in recent years (not least following the COVID-19 pandemic), and this raises considerable concerns for democratic engagement in society.

But not all news avoidance is equal: avoiding sports news, for instance, has a significantly less substantial impact on democratic functions than avoiding political news. Political journalism, which centrally addresses journalism’s watchdog role, is considerably more important in this context, but its frequent use of jargon as well as its …

The final day at thre AANZCA 2024 conference starts with a session on online news consumption, and the first speaker is Cameron McTernan, whose interest is in source and exposure diversity on Facebook. Facebook remains the most popular social media platform in Australia, but the future of news on the platform is in some doubt, given the impact of the News Media Bargaining Code and Meta’s intention to downrank or even remove news from its platforms.

This materially affects news outlets, as it also reduces traffic to their sites; but another key question here is how it impacts on the …

The final speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Saira Ali and Catherine Son, exploring Australian media’s response to counter-terrorism laws that limit press freedom. Such laws emerged in the post-9/11 era, and Australia has now passed a record 96 counter-terrorism laws since 2001 – these compound the lack of explicit provisions for press freedom under Australian law.

Any of these laws also impact on the Australian news media, so how have Australian media responded to security laws that restrict press and other freedoms, then? How have they responded especially to the ASIO Act, Metadata Retention laws, and the …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference is Rumeng Cao, whose focus is on Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent body introduced in response to increasingly critical scrutiny of the platform’s moderation and governance decisions following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Such governance can be divided into three phases: thin self-regulation (until 2012), strengthened self-regulation (2012-18), and the Oversight Board era (from 2018).

This can also be analysed from the perspective of the relationship between discourse and institutions: institutions are manifested through their discursive practices, but they also exist in a field of power relationships between their various stakeholders. This is …

I was the next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session, presenting our research on the changes in news posting and engagement during Facebook’s brief news ban in Australia in late February 2021, following the introduction of Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code. We would have liked to examine this for the ongoing news ban in Canada since August 2023, too, but unfortunately the Facebook URL Shares dataset has not been updated since November 2022, so we have not data to work with at this stage.

My slides are below: