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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:19

Australian News Media’s Lukewarm Response to the Counter-Terrorism Laws That Curb Its Freedoms

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

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 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:17

Facebook’s Oversight Board as a New Phase of Platform Self-Regulation

Politics | Government | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

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 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:16

What Happened on Facebook during Its Australian News Ban?

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | AANZCA 2024 |

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:

Facebook without the News: Link-Sharing Patterns during Meta’s Australian and …
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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 17:15

How and When Are News Media Subsidies Justified by Governments

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

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 …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 13:37

Mediating the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria

Politics | Government | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Alanna Myers, whose focus is on Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission and the questions of truth-telling and media coverage it raises. The defeat of the Voice to Parliament referendum seems to signal that Australians are not yet ready to embrace such truth-telling, yet at the same time Victoria is pushing ahead with its own truth-telling commission, which commenced here in the past week.

This has not received anywhere near the same level of coverage as the Voice referendum has received; this may be understandable given their different natures, yet must still …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 13:35

Patterns in Australian News Media Coverage of the Voice to Parliament Referendum

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

The next speaker at the AANZCA 2024 conference is my excellent colleague Katharina Esau, presenting our work on news media polarisation in the Voice to Parliament coverage. Our slides are below, too.

Mapping News Media Polarisation during the Voice to Parliament Referendum from Katharina Esau

Katharina notes that we are in a moment of polycrisis, with several crises all intersecting and influencing each other; in this, the role of news media cannot be overestimated, and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous voices would be extremely valuable. But we also live in a time of polarisation, which is complicated by the many incompatible …

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Snurb — Tuesday 26 November 2024 13:34

Themes in Political Leaders’ Responses on the Night of the Voice to Parliament Referendum

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | AANZCA 2024 |

The next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference has a strong focus on Indigenous Australians and the Voice to Parliament referendum, and starts with a paper by Lisa Waller, focussing on future visions for the post-referendum era. This explores in particular the speeches made on the night that the referendum results were announced: government speakers presented a limited agenda related to socioeconomic equality, while opposition speakers articulated a reactionary neo-assimilationist vision.

These speeches can be understood from a perspective of critical discourse analysis; these speeches occur in the context of mediatisation, as major televised statements immediately after the referendum results …

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Snurb — Monday 25 November 2024 16:17

A Brief Introduction to Practice Mapping

Politics | Polarisation | Social Media | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | AANZCA 2024 |

The next presentation in this AANZCA 2024 conference session was mine, introducing our new practice mapping approach. Here are the slides:

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks from Axel Bruns
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Snurb — Monday 25 November 2024 16:14

Assessing Media Concentration in the New Network Media Economy

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Streaming Media | AANZCA 2024 |

The final AANZCA 2024 conference session for today is one I’m also presenting in, but we start with a paper Terry Flew and Cameron McTernan. Terry starts by noting that Australia has long had one of the most concentrated media systems in the world. The Global Media and Internet Concentration Project (GMICP) is a new initiative to further explore such concentration patterns here and abroad, and trace their dynamics over time. This ultimately examines the network media economy, including telecommunication and Internet infrastructure, online and traditional media services, and core Internet applications and sectors.

This integrated approach better reflects the …

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Snurb — Monday 25 November 2024 13:43

NewsCorp’s Agenda-Building Efforts in the Voice to Parliament Referendum (and Beyond)

Politics | Elections | Polarisation | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | AANZCA 2024 |

Up next in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Catherine Son, whose focus is also on the agenda of News Corporation in its coverage of the 2023 referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Such coverage also exerts influence on other media, of course, through an intermedia agenda-setting process. The present project examined content from a number of NewsCorp publications on the Voice, and the focus in this presentation is especially on coverage in week 9 of the campaign, when claims were made that prominent Yes campaigner Marcia Langton called No supporters ‘racist’ and ‘stupid’.

NewsCorp immediately reporting positioned such …

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Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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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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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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