Blog

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:

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session is on media regulation and starts with Timothy Koskie, with a paper on news media regulation. He notes that we are in a time of permacrisis, and this is also being presented to us by contemporary news coverage; can these real or imagined catastrophes also provide us with an impulse for us to rethink news media regulation?

Specifically, should we rethink our approach to news media subsidies? The US started its first news media subsidy experiment as early as 1792, as part of building the new country; such state support is designed to foster …

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Joanne Gray, whose focus is on trends in Big Tech, with a particular focus on virtual reality (including Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and Apple’s Vision Pro, but also many more mature projects in augmented reality and immersive technology). Much of this has been described as extended reality, or XR, and policy to govern this is gradually emerging.

Such policy – in Japan, Europe, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, China – largely treats XR as an economic opportunity; but what do we actually know about the technologies underlying such XR developments? First, many …

The next speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Justine Humphry, Catherine Page Jeffery, and Jonathon Hutchinson, whose focus is on the current moral panic about young people’s uses of social media, in Australia and elsewhere. While such moral panics are not new, the current debate represents an escalation. How did we get here; what is the agenda; what role has it had in creating the conditions for regulatory change; and how does it affect norms, ideal, and expectations about childhood?

Moral panics about ‘the youth today’ are themselves far from new: the concept stems from Stanley Cohen’s work …