This page is updated monthly. For a full list of ADM+S publications please visit admscentre.org/zotero.
RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS
Automated Propaganda as Platform Imperative? The Case of Instant Articles
Yale Law School | Dang Nguyen
By situating automated propaganda outside of the perspectives of organized crime and coordinated state operations and instead within the larger context of economic informality and social disparities, this paper argues that researchers should pay more attention to information disorder at the systems level.
New Media and Society | Jean Burgess, Nicholas Carah, Daniel Angus, Abdul Karin Obeid and Mark Andrejevic
Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on the author’s own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram, and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, they find the feature falls short in two ways.
Mobile Media and Communication | Kieran Hegarty, Rowan Wilken, James Meese and Catherine Middleton
This article shows how dominant actors inscribe certain ideas, visions, and predictions of infrastructural futures for international mobile telecommunications through standardization. It argues that standard setting is a key avenue that brings different (and sometimes divergent) interests, groups, concerns, and activities into alignment around a certain vision of social and technological progress.
Media International Australia | Timothy Graham
This research found that the Yes campaign employed a traditional messaging approach, emphasising public support and presenting historical facts and statistics. In contrast, the No campaign’s disciplined messaging style mobilised pan-partisan attention, fostering a collaborative ‘truth market’ on X about the constitutional amendment that eclipsed the Yes campaign’s more conventional approach.
Buy Now: The link between alcohol advertising, online sales and rapid delivery
FARE | Lauren Hayden, Aimee Brownbill, Nicholas Carah et al.
“We previously found that alcohol companies target people with almost 40,000 alcohol advertisements in a 12-month period on Meta social media platforms alone and that alcohol retailers commonly used a ‘shop now’ button on their alcohol advertisements. This raises concern as these advertisements create a direct link between alcohol advertisements and the sale and rapid delivery of alcohol into homes which is associated with high risk alcohol use and harm.”
Chapter 45: Sex tech in an age of surveillance capitalism
Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights | Zahra Stardust
This chapter reviews key concepts from the literature on sex tech, sexual rights and ethical governance to explore how sex tech can be used to enhance rather than hinder access to sexual health, rights and justice. It suggests three fundamental lenses through which to consider the politics of sex tech – design, data and governance.
Producing, Owning and Managing Knowledge in the 21st Century University: Fieldwork Report
Report | Kathy Bowrey, Kylie Pappalardo, Kimberlee Weatherall, et al.
This report details findings from over fifty interviews with researchers, research managers and administrators, and librarians from ten Australian Higher Education institutions and two Australian funding bodies, asking open-ended questions about their experiences with, and opinions about, research policies and practices within higher education institutions in Australia.
Chapter 2: Children as Data Subjects: Families, Schools, and Everyday Lives
Dialogues in Data Power | Karen Louise Smith, Leslie Regan Shade, Neil Selwyn, et al.
“The datafication of childhood reverberates with many decision-makers. Parents, teachers, governments, and others often need to make a variety of decisions in their everyday lives… Our research addresses some of the many issues facing datafied children, roughly falling between the ages of zero to 18.”
Law, Innovation and Technology | Henry Fraser and Nicholas Suzor
Drawing on the theory of ‘system safety’, this paper argues that these difficulties can be diminished by conceptualising AI hazards as a set of socio-technical conditions (including system affordances, use context, and organisational arrangements) rather than specific aberrant outputs (‘errors’) with discrete technical causes.
Chapter 12: Curating Desire: The White Supremacist Grammar of Tagging on Pornhub
Sexual Racism and Social Justice | Chibundo Egwuatu, Zahra Stardust, Mireille Miller-Young, and Daisy Ducati
Bringing together a collection of research, personal reflection, and creative work, Sexual Racism and Social Justice provides a comprehensive, in-depth account of sexual racism from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. With an array of methods, disciplines, and positionalities, the volume argues that sexual racism is in the very foundations of our societies, determining the ideas, bodies, and systems positioned as desirable.
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
What is ‘model collapse’? An expert explains the rumours about an impending AI doom
ABC News | Aaron Snoswell
Dr Aaron Snoswell explains there are more subtle risks associated with increased use of generative AI. “A flood of synthetic content might not pose an existential threat to the progress of AI development, but it does threaten the digital public good of the (human) internet.”
The Conversation | Mark Sanderson
The impact of forcing Google to give up some of its market share might increase competition, however, reducing the search engine’s customer base too much might impact on the search engine’s ability to deliver high quality results, because the number of customer clicks that help tune the search engine algorithm would drop.
‘Be your own hero’: why video games are a battleground in the US–China tech war
The Conversation | Haiqing Yu
“The game is part of China’s strategic move to win the chip war by following’s Mao’s teaching of “encircling the cities from the countryside”. The short-term focus on the “countryside” of video games is for the long-term goal of taking over the “cities” of advanced chip manufacturing.”
The Conversation | Hiruni Kegalle, Danula Hettiachchi, Flora Salim and Mark Sanderson
Based on Hiruni Kegalle’s PhD research, this article suggests introducing designated parking points as a condition of permitting shared e‑scooters. This responds to the concerns of e‑scooter riders, pedestrians, cyclists, the Lime service provider, and local council members who have taken part in Hiruni’s study.
Social media algorithms are shrouded in secrecy. We’re trying to change that
The Conversation | Daniel Angus
The Australian internet Observatory will shed new light not just on how people interact on social media platforms but also on what content they see and how it is distributed. This enhanced visibility will improve our knowledge of the algorithms that power social media platforms – and their impact on society.
The Conversation | Timothy Graham
Polling conducted 12 months before the referendum showed majority public support for the proposed constitutional change, but ultimately the polls flipped and 60.06% of Australians voted “no”. Assoc Prof Tim Grahams research shows how misinformation and conspiratorial narratives on social media platforms – in particular, X (formerly known as Twitter) – played a key role.
The Conversation | Jessica Balanzategui, Djoymi Baker and Georgia Clift
Although the Australian government has recognised that the local children’s content sector in particular requires targeted solutions, the only policy change so far has been the removal of quotas for this content on commercial broadcasters. This resulted in a decrease of more than 84% in hours screened on commercial broadcasters between 2019 and 2022.
A world-first law in Europe is targeting artificial intelligence. Other countries can learn from it
The Conversation | Rita Matulionyte
The European Union recently introduced its Artificial Intelligence Act, the first law internationally designed to comprehensively manage AI risks – and Australia and other countries can learn much from it as they too try to ensure AI is safe and beneficial for everyone.
The Twitter That Was: Reflections on Ten Years of #auspol
Social Media and Society 2024 | Axel Bruns
Covering the period from December 2013 to July 2023, this study focusses on the long-standing political hashtag #auspol, used for tweets relating to Australian politics at the federal level, which has been the single most persistent and active hashtag in the Australian Twittersphere since Twitter was widely adopted as a platform for public communication in the country.
AI in the workplace: Balancing productivity and psychosocial risks
Australian institute of Health and Safety | Emmanuelle Walkowiak
Drawing on her research at RMIT University, Dr Walkowiak explains “AI will never be a ‘workforce’ and we will not have ‘AI workers’. The idea of reporting ‘digital workers’ as we report human employees is non-sensical. If you naively consider AI as an autonomous agent at work, you should audit your AI risks.”
Preprint | Axel Bruns, Kateryna Kasianenko, Vishnu Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan and Laura Vodden
This article introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping, using vector embeddings of network actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjuncture in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualisation.
Gilbert + Tobin | Peter Waters
There’s been a lot of noise about the use of AI as a tool for health professionals to improve diagnosis, develop treatment plans and monitor patients’ conditions. But in the hands of patients could AI improve their ability to understand and participate in decision making about their own treatment?
Political micro-targeting – peril or fizzer?
Gilbert + Tobin | Peter Waters
The concern over PMT is driven by the experience of targeted advertising of product and services on social media. But the bigger issue maybe, to quote Sam Altman CEO of Open AI – “ suspect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes.”
White House on Open Source AI: keep your hands off regulators
Gilbert + Tobin | Peter Waters
Regulators, including the UK’s CMA, are concerned AI markets could be dominated by a few vertically integrated firms globally. But have they underestimated the impact of open source AI?
Investigating the power of Big Tech: from a landmark judgement to changing research paradigms
Croakey Health Media | Aimee Brownbill and Lauren Hayden
While we might commonly think of ‘targeted’ advertising as targeting of characteristics like our age, gender, ethnicity, and interests, the hyper-targeted tuned advertising driving what we see online is much more algorithmically driven and insidious.
Relational ethics in health care automation
APO | Frances Shaw and Anthony McCosker
The purpose of this review is to offer a provocation for health care practitioners, managers and policy makers to consider the use automated tools in practice settings and examine how these tools might affect relationships and hence care outcomes.
The campaign to persuade: the “Voice” among Chinese Australians
Pearls and Irritations | Haiqing Yu
Prof Haiqing Yu from RMIT University writes explains how although the Voice failed, Australia’s multicultural communities became better educated on Indigenous issues throughout the process.