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Australia has fined X Australia over child sex abuse material concerns. How severe is the issue – and what happens now?

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Grant, has found X (formerly Twitter) guilty of serious non-compliance to a transparency notice on child sex abuse material.

Key Points: 
  • Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Grant, has found X (formerly Twitter) guilty of serious non-compliance to a transparency notice on child sex abuse material.
  • The commissioner has issued X with an infringement notice for A$610,500.
  • The commissioner first issued transparency notices to Google, X (then Twitter), Twitch, TikTok and Discord in February under the Online Safety Act 2021.

How severe is the issue?

    • It was the first quantitative analysis of child sex abuse material on the public sites of the most popular social media platforms.
    • The researchers’ findings highlighted Instagram and X (then Twitter) are particularly prolific platforms for advertising the sale of self-generated child sex abuse material.
    • As for X, they found the platform even allowed the public posting of known, automatically identifiable child sex abuse material.

Why does X have this content?

    • All major platforms - including X - have policies that ban child sex abuse material from their public services.
    • Most sites also explicitly prohibit related activities such as posting this content in private chats, and the sexualisation or grooming of children.
    • They should scrutinise content shared voluntarily by minors, and ideally should also weed out any AI-generated child sex abuse material.

Does the fine go far enough?

    • For instance, last year US federal regulators imposed a US$150 million (A$236.3 million) fine on X to settle claims it had misleadingly used email addresses and phone numbers for targeting advertising.
    • This year, Ireland’s privacy regulator slapped Meta, Facebook’s parent company, with a €1.2 billion (almost A$2 billion) fine for mishandling user information.
    • The latest fine of A$610,500, though small in comparison, is a blow to X’s reputation given its declining revenue and dwindling advertiser trust due to poor content moderation and the reinstating of banned accounts.

What happens now?

    • If it doesn’t, eSafety can initiate civil penalty proceedings and bring it to court.
    • Depending on the court’s decision, the cumulative fine could escalate to A$780,000 per day, retroactive to the initial non-compliance in March.
    • To get out, it’ll need to make a 180-degree turn on its approach to moderating content – especially that which harms and exploits minors.

Is marriage modern? Anna Kate Blair's novel poses the question, but doesn't answer it

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, October 3, 2023

This is the circuitous premise of Australian writer Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, The Modern, set in contemporary New York and centred on the life, half-loves and near-loves of Sophia, an Australian research fellow at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art).

Key Points: 
  • This is the circuitous premise of Australian writer Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel, The Modern, set in contemporary New York and centred on the life, half-loves and near-loves of Sophia, an Australian research fellow at MoMA (the Museum of Modern Art).
  • Review: The Modern – Anna Kate Blair (Scribner) Sophia’s engagement shakes out a constellation of loose questions about potential choices, possibilities and limitations.
  • When Robert departs, Sophia meets the mercurial, filament-like Cara, an unlikely assistant in a little-frequented New York wedding boutique.

Is marriage modern?

    • The question “Is marriage modern?” is less the fulcrum of Sophia’s personal narrative than, increasingly, a perplexing nonsense rhyme, or rhetorical question weighed down by its own glowering question mark.
    • Is marriage modern?
    • In the context of same-sex marriage, which Blair touches upon, marriage is modern, so long as you don’t drill down to its ideological underpinnings: the history of marriage as property transfer, its requisite reproductive labour, the spectacle of grim-lipped, decades-long resentments sustained under the oath of “til death do us part”.
    • By what barometer might we gauge “modernity” in marriage?

Smacked in the face by a dress

    • A flounce-ridden, gorgeously deep-red wedding dress in a Moonee Ponds wedding boutique window.
    • For one second, I entertained the idea of a wedding, but only because of that dress.
    • But the phenomenon itself – the overweening presence of the wedding dress in young women’s lives – remains under-explored.

Modern art ‘at every turn’

    • If the novel’s central question is not answered or adequately dissected, questions of modernity in art are more fulsomely, if curatorially, examined.
    • The Modern tosses “modern” artists and art at the reader at every turn, assuming a familiarity with art history on the reader’s part.
    • The Modern overflows with ideas: musings on modern art, and on the masculinist orientation of art institutions, in which female curatorial assistants doggedly do the work their male supervisors put their names to.

Curated, rather than known

    • She is curated rather than known; she’s a collection of iterations.
    • Perhaps this is Blair’s intention: Hartigan as surface, knowable only through her work, her private self inured to the public gaze.
    • But every character in The Modern feels somewhat like a bit-part: fleeting, insubstantial, or, in Robert’s case, downright wooden.

The five best films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, August 24, 2023

I’ve been talking to my film students lately about the way that viewing contexts affect how we receive a film – whether this means different hardware, locations, moods and modes of engaging.

Key Points: 
  • I’ve been talking to my film students lately about the way that viewing contexts affect how we receive a film – whether this means different hardware, locations, moods and modes of engaging.
  • The Melbourne International Film Festival gives such a fantastic opportunity for coming together like this for two weeks of really concentrated cinema experiences, a welcome retreat from winter.

Walk Up (Hong Sang-Soo, South Korea, 2022)

    • Part of the difficulty in writing about Hong’s work is that conversations among fans can feel exclusionary, heading immediately into auteurist gushing about form and repeated character types.
    • This repetition is one of the real pleasures of encountering his work.
    • If you’ve never seen a Hong film, you can expect slow, realist plots about relationships (romantic, familial).
    • In Walk Up, the filmmaker protagonist Byung-Soo (Hong regular Kwon Hae-Hyo), adult daughter in tow, visits an old girlfriend who owns a four-storey apartment building.

Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, US, 2022)

    • It’s fascinating how the most interesting hot teen actresses of my adolescence now play frumps in films by female auteurs.
    • Beautiful Michelle Williams’ dowdiness here rivals even Kirsten Dunst’s in The Beguiled or The Power of the Dog.
    • You would never believe this croc-clad, slouching woman was playing Marilyn Monroe 12 years ago.

Femme (Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, UK, 2023)

    • The moment Femme ended, the stranger to my right turned to me and said, “Wow, that was intense hey?
    • I was reminded of how many rape-revenge films don’t seem to understand that revenge is only satisfying if the survivor gets away with it.
    • And that sometimes we don’t want to see bullies learn the error of their ways – we just want to see them left out in the cold.

Gush (Fox Maxy, US, 2023)

    • The editing is unrelenting, with layers of sound collage and grainy digital shots of nature overlaid with MySpace-aesthetic animations, auto-tune, scenes of live theatre and TV clips of Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell.
    • Read more:
      The best films at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival

      This feels anathema to experimental film, which does sometimes intersect with the essay film (with an argument and something to say), but doesn’t have to.

    • Also – as I see someone clever on Letterboxd saying, it reads like “a series of bitchy Jonas Mekas TikToks”.

Phenomena (Dario Argento, Italy, 1985)

    • This was part of the festival’s Argento retrospective – new restoration prints of the horror and giallo master’s classics.
    • And 1985’s lurid hallucination Phenomena is a total blast.
    • You can watch a film nearly anywhere, but you need to be in the cinema for that kind of delightful experience.

Why are 'photo dumps' so popular? A digital communications expert explains

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, August 22, 2023

You’ve been to a “campout” with your school friends in someone’s back garden and taken a bunch of out-of-focus pictures on your digital camera.

Key Points: 
  • You’ve been to a “campout” with your school friends in someone’s back garden and taken a bunch of out-of-focus pictures on your digital camera.
  • The photos must be posted in a seemingly incoherent order and be “low effort” as opposed to being obviously edited.
  • This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties.
  • Experts explain how to tell the difference Bed rotting: the social media trend the Victorians would love, especially writer Elizabeth Gaskell

The rise of the dump


    Instagram launched the “carousel” feature in early 2017, which enables users to include up to ten images in one post. But photo dumps didn’t grace our feeds until around late 2020. There are several potential explanations for the photo dumps trend:
    “Dump” implies that images have been haphazardly thrown together, but this understates the craftsmanship that goes into post curation on Instagram. Sociologist Erving Goffman argued that there’s no such thing as accidental self-presentation. All human interactions, whether they take place via social media or elsewhere, demand some level of craft and decision making.

The roots of the dump

    • People usually craft their physical photo albums into one of a number of themes, like recording an event or a trip, both of which have made their way to Instagram.
    • And both the dump and the album lose meaning if you aren’t known to the poster, akin to the consequences of a physical photo album being discovered at a rummage sale.
    • For example, albums benefit tremendously from the white space surrounding each carefully placed image, through which authors can craft a narrative of personal memory.

The future of the dump

    • Instagram, it seems, feels like a friend, familiar enough to grace with carefully curated, multi-part posts to tell stories about our daily lives.
    • And so, as we grapple with new questions, promises and concerns about emerging technologies such as AI, perhaps we are drawn to using the familiar things in more intimate ways.
    • Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight,
      on Fridays.

As Meta launches its Threads microblogging site, Twitter is being kicked while it's down

Retrieved on: 
Monday, July 10, 2023

For once, he is on the receiving end as Meta launches its microblogging platform Threads to take advantage of his difficulties at Twitter.

Key Points: 
  • For once, he is on the receiving end as Meta launches its microblogging platform Threads to take advantage of his difficulties at Twitter.
  • Twitter, in effect, has been a near-monopoly in the realm of short pithy quotes from the well-known.
  • Dorsey was joint founder of the business and someone with more liberal views than Donald Trump.

Paying too much?

    • He tried to pull out of the deal realising he had over-bid for the business.
    • Boards are often accused of retrenchment when rebuffing bids and looking to protect their own jobs, power, status and pay.
    • At the same time, he felt the business was wallowing in cost and could make a better job of attracting advertisers.

Tesla losing out?

    • So far, Musk has antagonised virtually all stakeholders of Twitter and irritated other shareholders of Tesla – one of his major successes.
    • He scythed through the workforce, reducing the 8,500 employees to 1,500 in a matter of weeks.
    • However, she may find her remit limited by a chairman who may want to intervene.

Strategic mistake?

    • However, Musk may also have been guilty of strategic mistakes: if a company relies on advertising for revenue, then it needs to maximise users to create advertising reach.
    • Charging Tweeters and those reading Tweets is not going to maximise users, because many of them may simply leave.
    • While Twitter was undoubtedly heavy on cost before Musk took over, the extent of the staff cuts has left content frequently unmoderated.
    • Also, problems are brewing with regulatory authorities around the speed of removal of controversial material that appears on Twitter.
    • Unlike the proposed cage fight between Zuckerberg and Musk, this clash of social media companies can’t be settled by a simple knockout.

Meta's Threads is surging, but mass migration from Twitter is likely to remain an uphill battle

Retrieved on: 
Sunday, July 9, 2023

Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of sign-ups in the days following Twitter’s rate limit, and Meta launched its microblogging platform Threads on July 5.

Key Points: 
  • Most recently the microblogging platform backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky, saw a surge of sign-ups in the days following Twitter’s rate limit, and Meta launched its microblogging platform Threads on July 5.
  • Even very different forms of social media such as TikTok are benefiting from what many see as Twitter’s imminent demise.
  • The turmoil at Twitter is causing many of the company’s users to consider leaving the platform.
  • Research on previous social media platform migrations shows what might lie ahead for Twitter users who fly the coop.

‘You go first’

    • These migrations are in large part driven by network effects, meaning that the value of a new platform depends on who else is there.
    • For this reason, the “death” of a platform – whether from a controversy, disliked change or competition – tends to be a slow, gradual process.

It’ll never be the same

    • What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that takes place there.
    • And there is essentially zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, could be reconstituted on another platform.
    • But as our study implies, migrations always have a cost, and even for smaller communities, some people will get lost along the way.

The ties that bind

    • They might be unwilling to completely cut ties all at once, but they might dip their toes into a new platform by sharing the same content on both.
    • Ways to import networks from another platform also help to maintain communities.
    • In this sense, Threads has an advantage over other Twitter alternatives because users sign up via their Instagram accounts.
    • But even if there is a price to pay for leaving a platform, communities can be incredibly resilient.

Why Meta's Threads app is the biggest threat to Twitter yet

Retrieved on: 
Friday, July 7, 2023

The launch of social media app Threads as a competitor to Twitter is a game-changer.

Key Points: 
  • The launch of social media app Threads as a competitor to Twitter is a game-changer.
  • Threads was welcomed almost immediately – especially by hordes of Twitter users that have watched in dismay as their beloved platform crumbles in the hands of Elon Musk.
  • The question now is: will Threads be the one that finally unseats Twitter?

We’ve been here before

    • But many found its decentralised servers difficult and confusing to use, with each one having very different content rules and communities.
    • Many Twitter fans created “back up” Mastodon accounts in case Twitter crashed, and waited to see what Musk would do next.
    • Platform instability and outages became common as Musk started laying off Twitter staff (he has now fired about 80% of Twitter’s original workforce).
    • Musk also labelled trusted news organisations such as the BBC as “state-owned” media, until public backlash forced him to retreat.

Community is the key to success

    • It had long been a home for journalists, governments, academics and the public to share information on the key issues of the day.
    • While not without flaws – such as trolls, bots and online abuse – Twitter’s verification process and the ability to block and report inappropriate content was central to its success in building a thriving community.
    • The ability to retain community in an app that provides a similar experience to Twitter is what makes Threads the biggest threat yet.
    • My research shows that people crave authority, authenticity and community the most when they engage with online information.

Challenges ahead

    • New Threads users who read the fine print will note that their information will be used to “personalize ads and other experiences” across both platforms.
    • And users have pointed out you can only delete your Threads account if you delete your Instagram account.
    • The EU’s new Digital Markets Act could raise challenges for Threads.
    • When and how Threads achieves this plan for decentralised engagement – and how this might impact users’ experience – is unclear.

Did Meta steal ‘trade secrets’?

    • Just hours after Threads’ release, Twitter’s lawyer Alex Spiro released a letter accusing Meta of “systematic” and “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets.
    • Meta has disputed these claims, according to reports, but the rivalry between the two companies seems far from over.

How fine dining in Europe and the US came to exclude immigrant cuisine and how social media is pushing back – podcast

Retrieved on: 
Thursday, July 6, 2023

The history of restaurants, food and, especially, fine dining, is deeply tied to the history of immigration to the U.S. and French cultural power in the early 20th century.

Key Points: 
  • The history of restaurants, food and, especially, fine dining, is deeply tied to the history of immigration to the U.S. and French cultural power in the early 20th century.
  • Not surprisingly, the story that leads to Yelp and Anthony Bourdain is not without its share of racism that the modern food world and its tastemakers are still grappling with today.

The definition of ‘good food’

    • To understand where the ideas that define good food come from, it’s helpful to understand how the modern restaurant came to be.
    • As the world urbanized, more and more people began to eat at restaurants, and the concept of the food critic emerged.
    • When Gualtieri asked 120 New York chefs whose opinions mattered most, they most valued the opinions of their peers – and the Michelin Guide.

Immigration and ethnic food

    • But ethnic food – whether it is Mexican, Japanese or, in the past, Italian food – is a massive part of the U.S. food scene.
    • As Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at New York University in the U.S., explains, the perceptions of immigrant food are closely tied to perceptions of the immigrants themselves.
    • “What you see is there’s a kind of a early popularity of immigrant foods, first inside the community, and then slowly it spreads outward.
    • Other people start eating, journalists are eating and writing about it, but it does not acquire prestige,” Ray explains.

Social media influencers as food critics

    • In an era of social media, many people are now turning to Yelp, TikTok or Instagram to figure out where they want to get a meal.
    • “Culturally and economically, Instagram food criticism is a lot more inclusive than Michelin,” says Feldman.
    • “I started out thinking of Instagram food culture as being something created by amateurs, by just people as obsessed with food as I might be,” says Feldman.
    • Feldman thinks that, with so much food media out there, there is more opportunity to find good food, but the definition of that, as she puts it, is “food that you actually enjoy eating.” This episode was produced and written by Dan Merino and Katie Flood.

Bill C-18: Google and Meta spark crucial test for Canadian journalism

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, July 4, 2023

Three events have recently marked a powerful inflection point in Canadian journalism.

Key Points: 
  • Three events have recently marked a powerful inflection point in Canadian journalism.
  • First, Google and Meta announced they will no longer share Canadian news links on their platforms in response to the new Online News Act, Bill C-18, designed to make them pay for their use of Canadian journalism.

What’s at stake?

    • At stake is the nature of the country’s communications ecosystem, affecting how Canadians get news and information that matters to them.
    • As former journalists, researchers and co-founders of The Conversation Canada, a national not-for-profit news organization dedicated to sharing insights from academics, we support the emergence of the best possible journalism ecosystem given the conditions.

The role of Google and Meta

    • For now, Canadians won’t notice anything different as Google says the changes will take place when the law comes into effect over the coming months.
    • Similarly, Meta plans to phase out news by the end of the year.
    • Google also announced that it would close down its Google News Showcase program, launched in 2021.

Act expected to take six months to be in place

    • These moves by Google and Meta were precipitated by the Online News Act, which became law on June 22.
    • It is likely to take six months to come into force as the Department of Canadian Heritage works out the details on how to enforce it.

How we got here

    • The main focus of Google’s activities has involved funding individual organizations through direct payment deals for content on Showcase.
    • The company has also provided funding for digital innovation and training, oriented within their own proprietary systems, and boot camps for startup entrepreneurs.
    • For example, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Google provided $1.5 million to 230 Canadian newsrooms.

Why now?

    • This is separate to its support of the CBC, the country’s public broadcaster.
    • And this is where the proposed moves by media giants Postmedia, Nordstar (publisher of the Toronto Star) and Bell come in.
    • The larger questions for Canadians are about the nature, amount and quality of journalism and who controls its communications infrastructures.

Impact of Postmedia-Nordstar merger

    • Examples such as the proposed merger of Postmedia and Nordstar illustrate one of the trade-offs under consideration about the amount of journalism content and who is doing it, in addition to journalist economic conditions.
    • The last time the two companies made a deal to swap papers in 2017 resulted in 291 job losses and continuing centralization of content.
    • How we understand what is happening now and how we got here is necessary to make sound policy decisions moving forward.

Cambodia PM Hun Sen will shut down opposition on election day – even if he can no longer threaten voters on Facebook

Retrieved on: 
Saturday, July 1, 2023

On June 30, 2023, the Facebook page of Hun Sen – who has ruled the country as leader of the Cambodian People’s Party for almost four decades – appeared to have been deleted.

Key Points: 
  • On June 30, 2023, the Facebook page of Hun Sen – who has ruled the country as leader of the Cambodian People’s Party for almost four decades – appeared to have been deleted.
  • It wasn’t immediately clear whether Hun Sen had removed the page or Meta had taken it down.
  • Cambodia has had Hun Sen as prime minister for 38 years.

Many parties, no opposition

    • The problem for democracy watchers is that the list of parties allowed to run does not include the main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party.
    • Further, the Candle Light Party – the last vestige of real, credible opposition in Cambodia – was not permitted to register for the forthcoming election for bureaucratic reasons.
    • The missing paperwork that prevented registration is believed by CLP supporters to have been taken during a police raid on opposition headquarters years ago.

Khmer Rouge commander to autocratic leader

    • Hun Sen rose to power after being installed as deputy prime minister and foreign minister by the Vietnamese forces that liberated Cambodia in 1979 from the Khmer Rouge – a murderous regime in which Hun Sen served as a commander – and then occupied the country for a decade.
    • With his country still under Vietnamese occupation, Hun Sen became prime minister in 1985 after his predecessor, Chan Sy, died in office.
    • Since then, he has used the power of incumbency – along with a large dose of brute force – to remain in office.
    • After falling out with his co-premier, Hun Sen orchestrated a coup in 1997 and replaced Norodom Ranariddh.

From autocracy to nepotocracy?

    • In advance of the July 23 vote, the government has cracked down on independent media.
    • One of the last truly independent outlets, the Voice of Democracy, was shuttered by Hun Sen. Its crime?
    • Yet, Voice of Democracy was nonetheless blamed and told to apologize, which it did, but then was still shuttered.
    • Cambodia’s anti-democratic rule and human rights abuses have been condemned by the European Union, the White House and the United Nations.