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Disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms are growing regulatory concerns for governments. In this paper, we examine Australia’s DIGI Code of Practice (CoP). The CoP is a voluntary set of commitments to address false content on platforms that is overseen by Australia’s digital media industry. It was established in response to a federal government directive. We evaluate the DIGI CoP by comparing it to the code it was partially based on: the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation (EU CPD). The EU CPD also attempted voluntary regulation, and yet the EU is now moving towards a strengthened CPD. While the DIGI CoP improves upon the original EU CPD, the original version had limited accountability measures and notable content exclusions. We conclude by discussing a recent review of the CoP, suggesting that Australia will also strengthen regulation in this area. Lastly, we address ongoing tensions around media freedom and accountability.

Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian ‘news ban’ exposed the limits of a regulatory model that has previously left the tech industry to moderate itself. In this paper, we argue the introduction of the Code is a leading example of a global trajectory towards regulatory change, which sees governments move from a reactive regulation model to specific interventions around the governance of digital media spaces. We discuss how best to measure the successes and failures around this more interventionist model through a case study of the implementation of the Code in Australia. More broadly we consider how global platforms have responded, and whether the reform is an effective regulatory model for other national governments to emulate.

As Australia imposed some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 lockdowns, governments and mental health organisations released advice for preserving mental wellbeing throughout the pandemic. One common suggestion was to avoid excessive news consumption. This article reports findings from a study that explored why, how, and with what outcomes people engaged in news avoidance practices. We conducted interviews with 20 participants from the Australian state of Victoria which experienced the country’s most sustained lockdown measures. Our data shows that people restricted their news consumption for a range of wellbeing-related reasons. Avoidance practices were shaped by household contexts and involved strategies for remaining informed to a limited degree. These findings contribute to an emerging evidence base that points to the benefits of partial news avoidance. They also reiterate the value of public health advice that suggests limiting news during a crisis. We go on to argue that the prevalence of news avoidance practices during long-term crises raises significant practical implications for news organisations.

There is a growing concern around the dependency of news organisations on platforms like Facebook for audience traffic. However, scholars are still working out the extent of this dependency and how it manifests in practice. In this article, we draw on interviews with Australian news professionals and industry fieldwork to provide a nuanced account of this phenomenon. We find that news media organisations have recently started to diversify their distribution strategies and the business models associated with them in response to Facebook’s algorithm changes. While Facebook remains important, we suggest that greater attention needs to be paid to the complex relationships that news organisations have with platforms. This article ends by considering the implications of these findings for international policy discussions centred around the prospect of platform regulation.

Governments and policymakers are considering intervening in the relationship between major tech companies and the news media industry and holding various inquiries and reviews to canvass reform options. This article provides a comparative study of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, some of the earliest countries in the world to engage in these policy processes. The study reveals that these media systems have devised similar regulatory tools and their approach aligns with a more disaggregated set of reforms occurring across Europe. While these reform agendas often draw on valuable concepts from media policy, they also awkwardly translate frameworks and introduce already questionable regulatory approaches to the platform environment. The most notable is the ongoing focus on stakeholders instead of the wider public interest. I end the paper by arguing the long-term sustainability of journalism need to be decoupled from attempts to limit platform power. I outline a more targeted regulatory response focussed on antitrust and privacy and note that journalism will receive downstream benefits from these efforts. The approach challenges the core issues associated with platform dominance and stands in contrast to current reform proposals, which threaten to hamper much needed institutional transformation across the journalism sector.

Public service media organisations manage the challenges they face as they transition to a converged environment by innovating in the areas of distribution, programming, and engagement. Many commercial media companies critique public service innovation and argue that it is ‘crowding out’ the private market. Focusing on public service media organisations in Germany and Australia, this article examines the relationship between innovation, regulation and resilience. We argue that while the Australian model of innovation performs a vital role for the domestic media industry, it does not always contribute to the long-term resilience of individual innovations brought out by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Conversely, while innovation is hamstrung by layers of bureaucracy in Germany, once innovations developed by Second German Television are legally approved, they operate in a relatively uncontested manner. To explain the findings, we propose a comparative framework consisting of four factors: size, public/private divide, regulatory frameworks and legal traditions.

For many privacy scholars, consent is on life support, if not dead. In July 2020, we held six focus groups in Australia to test this claim by gauging attitudes to consent and privacy, with a spotlight on smartphones. These focus groups included discussion of four case studies: ‘shadow profiles’, eavesdropping by companies on smartphone users, non-consensual government surveillance of its citizens and contact tracing apps developed to combat COVID-19. Our participants expressed concerns about these practices and said they valued individual consent and saw it as a key element of privacy protection. However, they saw the limits of individual consent, saying that the law and the design of digital services also have key roles to play. Building on these findings, we argue for a blend of good law, good design and an appreciation that individual consent is still valued and must be fixed rather than discarded - ideally in ways that are also collective. In other words, consent is dead; long live consent.

Since changing its algorithm in January 2018 to boost the content of family and friends over other content (including news), Facebook has signaled that it is less interested in news. However, the field is still trying to understand the long-term impacts of this change for news publishers. This is a problem because policymakers and legislators across the world are becoming concerned about the relationship between platforms and publishers. In particular, there are worries that platforms’ ability to make unilateral decisions about how their algorithms operate may harm the economic sustainability of journalism. This article provides some clarity around the relationship between these two parties through a longitudinal study of the Australian news media sector’s relationship with Facebook from 2014 to 2020, with a particular focus on the January 2018 algorithm change. We do this by analyzing Facebook data (2,082,804 posts from CrowdTangle) and external traffic data from 32 major Australian news outlets. These data are contextualized by additional desk research. We identify a range of trends including the decline of news sharing, the collapse in the performance of “social news,” the variable position of social media as a source of referral traffic, and, most critically, the diffused nature of the 2018 algorithm change. Our approach cannot make direct causal inferences. We can only identify trends in on-platform performance and referral traffic, which we then contextualize with industry reportage. However, the data provide vital longitudinal insights into the performance and responses of individual media outlets, news categories, and the Australian media sector as a whole during a critical moment of algorithmic change.

This article examines the emergence of conspiracy theories linking COVID-19 with 5G, with a focus on Australia, the United States and United Kingdom. The article is in two parts. The first details long-standing concerns around mobile technologies and infrastructures before showing how they translate to specific worries about 5G technology. The second shows how these fears have fuelled specific conspiracies connecting 5G with COVID-19, how they have animated protests and acts of vandalism that have occurred during the pandemic, and the ongoing engagement of conspiracists with official inquiries into 5G. Finally, we argue that a productive way to understand what is happening with 5G is to look beyond conspiracy theories to a larger set of concerns. We argue that the battle for control of 5G infrastructure can be productively understood in geopolitical terms, as forms of economic statecraft, which partly explains why governments are increasingly concerned about countering misinformation and disinformation around 5G.

This chapter examines mobile media technologies in Samoa, a small island developing state (SIDS) in the South Pacific. Drawing on key informant interviews conducted with various Samoan telecommunications stakeholders, we explore how mobile phones have altered the notion of “location” across the country. Through our analysis, we identify a range of different context-dependent ways that location is defined, understood and mobilised. We argue that questions of location are crucial to understanding the telecommunications landscape in Samoa and the numerous infrastructural challenges that lie ahead. Therefore, location must be subsequently considered at a variety of scales. The argument is developed conceptually and theoretically by building on recent work in human geography on relational understandings of place and extending Mimi Sheller’s work on “uneven topologies of geomedia.” The article will proceed in the following fashion. We outline and analyse three locative scales in Samoa – the macro, the meso and the micro – as well as articulate the relational ties that exist between them. The macro level emerges when respondents situate issues around mobile phones in relation to Samoa’s own geographic location, for example the use of mobiles to communicate with relatives overseas or to use the mobile as a substitute for intra-island travel. At this level, we see the ways that the mobile has helped Samoans negotiate their own comparatively isolated geographic position in the middle of the South Pacific, for example allowing them to “locate” other family members living in other countries. The meso level emerges as we attend to movement and social relations, through an analysis of mobile money use in Samoa. Mobile money provides an excellent example of intersecting and often clashing alternative topologies of location, with the de-territorialised affordances of the internet merging awkwardly with the on-the-ground capacity of Samoa to deliver a seamless mobile money experienc

© 2019, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. All rights reserved. This paper examines how data access and transfer rights are conceptualised in the European Union and Australia. The study discusses the planned introduction of a Consumer Data Right (CDR) to Australia and contrasts it to comparable developments in European law. We then assess the broader reform moments around data (which these various data access and transfer rights form a part of), that have occurred in each jurisdiction. The paper shows that Europe has placed an increasing value on protecting the fundamental rights of citizens, whereas Australia has taken a more neoliberal approach to data, only granting individuals rights in the context of the market.

© 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. A growing number of companies are offering digital products and services for use in funerals. Drawing on interdisciplinary research in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, we explore how funeral directors operate as intermediaries for these digital products and services. We critically examine the popular framing of the funeral industry as a “conservative” business and examine how funeral directors actively mediate between their clients and the companies offering innovative products and services. This study provides an account of current developments in the funeral economy as well as a broader narrative about how funeral industry professionals have engaged with technology.

© 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. In current debates over copyright law, the author, the user, and the pirate are almost always invoked. Some in the creative industries call for more legal protection for authors; activists and academics promote user rights and user-generated content; and online pirates openly challenge the strict enforcement of copyright law. In this book, James Meese offers a new way to think about these three central subjects of copyright law, proposing a relational framework that encompasses all three. Meese views authors, users, and pirates as interconnected subjects, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice. Meese presents a series of historical and contemporary examples, from nineteenth-century cases of book abridgement to recent controversies over the reuse of Instagram photos. He not only considers the author, user, and pirate in terms of copyright law, but also explores the experiential element of subjectivity -- how people understand and construct their own subjectivity in relation to these three subject positions. Meese maps the emergence of the author, user, and pirate over the first two centuries of copyright's existence; describes how regulation and technological limitations turned people fromcreators to consumers; considers relational authorship; explores practices in sampling, music licensing, and contemporary art; examines provisions in copyright law for user-generated content; and reimagines the pirate as an innovator.

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. This article presents early findings from a study examining the introduction of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services to the Australian market from the perspective of the Australian home. Through a series of group interviews with nine ‘early adopter’ households in Melbourne and Sydney, I detail how these services entered the home and contribute to changing habits and practices around media consumption and access. These interviews reveal that despite the ‘mobile’ promise of SVOD services, households still view the television as a central site for communal media consumption. This consumption is also becoming increasingly legal, with participants engaging in less copyright infringement after subscribing. While many households are still using circumvention tools to access overseas libraries, this is highly dependent on the presence of a digitally literate householder.

© 2018 main text Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Tamara Kohn, James Meese, and Bjorn Nansen; afterword Elizabeth Hallam. All rights reserved. Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn, commemorate and interact with the dead through digital media. It maps the historical and shifting landscape of digital death, considering a wide range of social, commercial and institutional responses to technological innovations. The authors examine multiple digital platforms and offer a series of case studies drawn from North America, Europe and Australia. The book delivers fresh insight and analysis from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and media studies. It is key reading for students and scholars in these disciplines, as well as for professionals working in bereavement support capacities.

Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known as ‘Zyzz’, died in 2011 at the age of 22 from a heart attack in a Bangkok sauna. Zyzz was a well- known figure among amateur bodybuilders — a subculture which seeks to achieve the ‘aesthetics’ of a highly muscular physique. Prior to his death, Zyzz had become a minor internet celebrity, actively self-promoting through social media to create a personal brand. He had a Facebook following of more than 60,000 ‘fans’ and regularly posted videos of himself on YouTube. Following his death, however, coverage of Zyzz exploded, with both social and traditional media discussing his death, his status as a role model and celebrity, and the growing use of steroids among amateur bodybuilders.