Politics

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/).

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 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.

The final day at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference begins with a paper by Wujiong Ren, who begins by highlighting the role of social media in accompanying international conflicts. He suggests that the Russian war against Ukraine is the first to fully combine physical and cyberwarfare.

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference is Doruk Şen, whose interest is in examining elite and mass polarisation from a multi-polar, network perspective. The focus here is especially on Turkey, which at present is dominated by the autocratic AK Parti.

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Nic DePaula, whose interest is in the association between local and regional risk levels and social media use and engagement in the US in the context of COVID-19. This is in the broader context of public health communication on social media, which is now common if unevenly distributed across agencies, due to various internal and external factors.

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.

The next session at Social Media & Society 2024 starts with Leiyuan Tian, who is interested in pro-China influencers on Twitter. These practice a kind of grey propaganda, part of the overall network of Chinese public diplomacy but not formally representing the Chinese government. How do such influencers present themselves, and what persuasive frames do they employ?

The final speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Sergei Pashakhin, whose is in the interfacing between platform companies and political institutions, especially in the context of autocratising regimes. Social media platforms operate around the world, and have to respond to the political and legislative situations in the countries in which they operate. Their transparency reports tend to provide a window into how they do so: these reports cover state requests for content moderation and take-downs, for instance.