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The term sexting has come to be associated with media, political and public concern over young people's involvement in the sending and/or receiving of nude or semi-nude images and/or videos of one another. Public discourses around sexting have framed the practice as problematic, reflecting long-held -- and often very real -- anxieties over young people and their sexuality. Of particular focus in relation to sexting have been the risks and harms associated with the practice and current or potential legal responses. Missing from much of this public discourse, however, have been the voices of young people themselves. In order to bring young people's voices into the discourse, this article draws on research conducted with young people, as well as extensive legal and media analysis of sexting by young people. It contrasts these popular and legal discourses around sexting with the discourses of young people themselves, exploring the ways in which they understand and perceive sexting and how these perceptions converge with and diverge from dominant discourses. In this way, the article demonstrates the fundamental discord between such discourses, indicating the need to rethink legal responses to sexting between young people.

This article maps the important albeit under-researched relationship between young people, social network sites, and surveillance practices they encounter or engage with in their digital lives. Based on original empirical research, this article unpacks the complexities of young people’s digital identities, and explores strategies of surveillance, covert and overt, that young people are subjected to and perform on a daily basis. Often justified through risk-based crime prevention narratives, such intrusive strategies scrutinise young people in order to anticipate crime and victimisation on social network sites that has not yet, and might never occur. As such, these strategies are arguably underpinned by pre-crime logics of anticipating and targeting impending crime and victimisation. Importantly, they are increasingly normalised as they are imposed for young people’s “own good”. Yet, as this article demonstrates, young people are aware of such strategies and simultaneously engage in, experience being subject to, and resist surveillance practices.

Recently, numerous police organisations have made a strategic decision to employ humour on social media, via memes and other comical posts, to increase community engagement with their content and manage their public image. One key example of this practice comes from New South Wales Police, a state-based Australian police force whose self-described 'meme strategy' led to considerable increases in the organisation's social media following. Through analysing the content of NSW Police's memetic copaganda, in this article we unpack this approach to police public relations, detailing its rationale and implications. Police on social media, we argue, must address two very different regimes of visibility: 'policing's new visibility', characterised by the increased visibility of police indiscretion as a result of citizen-produced content, and a 'threat of invisibility', in which the visibility of police-produced content on social media is always provisional, never assured. We consequently argue that the humorous turn in police image work represents a countermeasure to not only policing's new visibility but also the 'threat of invisibility' facing police-produced content on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]