Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Sep 3, 2021
ABSTRACT Using Reddit as a case study, this article blurs the boundary between the ‘dark’ and ‘cl... more ABSTRACT Using Reddit as a case study, this article blurs the boundary between the ‘dark’ and ‘clear’ web, arguing that in between these spaces there is what I describe as a ‘brackish web’, inhabited by ‘brackish social spaces’. Reddit, I argue, sits in a murky space between the dark and clear, with its technological rationality, politics, and technological affordances exhibiting elements of both the clear and dark infrastructures. I study these similarities through examining Reddit’s relationship to surveillance, arguing that it exhibits similarities to the dark web through a politics of anonymity and its practices of content moderation. Reddit, however, has slowly moved away from some of its ‘dark’ elements, in particular through a growing reliance on advertising revenue. This has pushed the platform to engage in more surveillance of its users, pushing it away from its dark web politics. This article challenges the dark and clear web binary, further nuancing our understandings of the politics, economics and technological rationality that underpins online digital platforms.
This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed... more This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed Australians on their position on marriage equality from September to November 2017. Opposition to the hosting of a public vote on marriage equality was based in a perceived vulnerability of LGBTIQ Australians, with marriage equality advocates taking what Tietze (2016) described as a 'dark view of the voting public'. While acknowledging the high levels of homophobic rhetoric that occurred during the postal survey, and the impacts that public votes can have on the mental health of LGBTIQ people, the article argues this 'dark view' was overstated. This article argues that opposition to the survey reinforced vulnerability within LGBTIQ Australians, promoting an increased reliance on the state for protection and recognition. Opposition ignored the democratic potential of the survey, particularly as an opportunity to further debate on LGBTIQ issues and to reduce broader societal homophobia. Despite the eventual yes vote therefore, approaches to the postal survey missed a political opportunity, likely leaving LGBTIQ Australians and the Australian queer movement in a weaker position than previously.
This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit's quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platf... more This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit's quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platform as a means of restricting and reducing misogynistic and other hateful material. Using the case studies of r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, the paper argues the quarantine successfully cordoned off affected subreddits and associated hateful material from the rest of the platform. It did not, however, reduce the levels of hateful material within the affected spaces. Instead many users reacted by leaving Reddit for less regulated spaces, with Reddit making this hateful material someone else's problem. The paper argues therefore that the success of the quarantine as a policy response is mixed. Issue 4 This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guestedited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu. Content moderation is an integral part of the political economy of large social media platforms (Gillespie, 2018). While social media companies position themselves as platforms which offer unlimited potential of free expression (Gillespie, 2010), these same sites have always engaged in some form of content moderation (Marantz, 2019). In recent years, in response to increasing pressure from the public, lawmakers and advertisers, many large social media companies have given up much of their free speech rhetoric and have become more active in regulating abusive, misogynistic, racist and homophobic language on their platforms. This has occurred in particular through banning and restricting users and channels (Marantz, 2019). In 2018 for example, a number of large social media companies banned the high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his platform InfoWars from their platforms (Hern, 2018), while in 2019 the web infrastructure company Cloudflare deplatformed the controversial site 8chan (Prince, 2019). In 2020 a number of platforms even began regulating material from President Donald Trump, with Twitter placing fact-checks and warnings on some of his tweets and the platform Twitch temporarily suspending his account (Copland and Davis, 2020). As one of the largest digital platforms in the world, Reddit has not been immune from this pressure. Built upon a reputation of being a bastion of free speech (Ohanian, 2013), Reddit has historically resisted censoring its users, despite the prominence of racist, misogynistic, homophobic and explicitly violent material on the platform (for examples,
Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, suc... more Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, successive governments have struggled to implement policy to tackle this issue. Using the case of opposition to the Clean Energy Act, passed in Australia to establish an emissions trading scheme, this paper argues that a growing and broad sentiment of distrust in political elites, described as 'anti-politics', can explain some of this contradiction. Particular forms of climate policy, in particular emissions trading schemes, have been successfully framed as policies that appeal to the interests of a new class of liberal elites while hurting ordinary working people. This frame was used successfully in Australia by conservative forces to oppose the Clean Energy Act. While used cynically by political leaders in this case, the paper argues that anti-political sentiment reflects genuine concerns about the detachment between the state and voting population. This detachment is reflected in neoliberal climate policies. Through briefly examining the cases of the Trump Administration's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, the paper argues that while formulating climate policy we must consider anti-political sentiment, developing responses to the climate crisis from a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.
The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women's lives... more The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women's lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men's lives: gendering men's lives, exploring the rich diversity of men's lives-globally and locally, textually and practically-as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.
This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed... more This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed Australians on their position on marriage equality from September to November 2017. Opposition to the hosting of a public vote on marriage equality was based in a perceived vulnerability of LGBTIQ Australians, with marriage equality advocates taking what Tietze (2016) described as a 'dark view of the voting public'. While acknowledging the high levels of homophobic rhetoric that occurred during the postal survey, and the impacts that public votes can have on the mental health of LGBTIQ people, the article argues this 'dark view' was overstated. This article argues that opposition to the survey reinforced vulnerability within LGBTIQ Australians, promoting an increased reliance on the state for protection and recognition. Opposition ignored the democratic potential of the survey, particularly as an opportunity to further debate on LGBTIQ issues and to reduce broader societal homophobia. Despite the eventual yes vote therefore, approaches to the postal survey missed a political opportunity, likely leaving LGBTIQ Australians and the Australian queer movement in a weaker position than previously.
Current research ethics processes, based on the mantra of privacy and institutional protection, t... more Current research ethics processes, based on the mantra of privacy and institutional protection, take a paternalistic approach to research participants that leaves them open to harm. Reflecting on our own research/consultancy as a case study to illustrate the current flaws, we explore our and our subjects’ experiences within the wider political context of institutional ethical rules and the Australian NHMRC guidelines. In doing so we argue for fundamental changes to the modern research ethics processes – a system that treats participants more as research collaborators rather than victims in waiting. A complete review of ethics processes is needed to empower participants and researchers to recognize the reality of the process as co-created and negotiated. This includes changes at the top level of research administration – a shift in ethics policies and procedures as well as greater education in ethics with commensurate trust for active researchers.
Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Sep 3, 2021
ABSTRACT Using Reddit as a case study, this article blurs the boundary between the ‘dark’ and ‘cl... more ABSTRACT Using Reddit as a case study, this article blurs the boundary between the ‘dark’ and ‘clear’ web, arguing that in between these spaces there is what I describe as a ‘brackish web’, inhabited by ‘brackish social spaces’. Reddit, I argue, sits in a murky space between the dark and clear, with its technological rationality, politics, and technological affordances exhibiting elements of both the clear and dark infrastructures. I study these similarities through examining Reddit’s relationship to surveillance, arguing that it exhibits similarities to the dark web through a politics of anonymity and its practices of content moderation. Reddit, however, has slowly moved away from some of its ‘dark’ elements, in particular through a growing reliance on advertising revenue. This has pushed the platform to engage in more surveillance of its users, pushing it away from its dark web politics. This article challenges the dark and clear web binary, further nuancing our understandings of the politics, economics and technological rationality that underpins online digital platforms.
This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed... more This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed Australians on their position on marriage equality from September to November 2017. Opposition to the hosting of a public vote on marriage equality was based in a perceived vulnerability of LGBTIQ Australians, with marriage equality advocates taking what Tietze (2016) described as a 'dark view of the voting public'. While acknowledging the high levels of homophobic rhetoric that occurred during the postal survey, and the impacts that public votes can have on the mental health of LGBTIQ people, the article argues this 'dark view' was overstated. This article argues that opposition to the survey reinforced vulnerability within LGBTIQ Australians, promoting an increased reliance on the state for protection and recognition. Opposition ignored the democratic potential of the survey, particularly as an opportunity to further debate on LGBTIQ issues and to reduce broader societal homophobia. Despite the eventual yes vote therefore, approaches to the postal survey missed a political opportunity, likely leaving LGBTIQ Australians and the Australian queer movement in a weaker position than previously.
This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit's quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platf... more This paper studies the efficacy of the Reddit's quarantine, increasingly implemented in the platform as a means of restricting and reducing misogynistic and other hateful material. Using the case studies of r/TheRedPill and r/Braincels, the paper argues the quarantine successfully cordoned off affected subreddits and associated hateful material from the rest of the platform. It did not, however, reduce the levels of hateful material within the affected spaces. Instead many users reacted by leaving Reddit for less regulated spaces, with Reddit making this hateful material someone else's problem. The paper argues therefore that the success of the quarantine as a policy response is mixed. Issue 4 This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guestedited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu. Content moderation is an integral part of the political economy of large social media platforms (Gillespie, 2018). While social media companies position themselves as platforms which offer unlimited potential of free expression (Gillespie, 2010), these same sites have always engaged in some form of content moderation (Marantz, 2019). In recent years, in response to increasing pressure from the public, lawmakers and advertisers, many large social media companies have given up much of their free speech rhetoric and have become more active in regulating abusive, misogynistic, racist and homophobic language on their platforms. This has occurred in particular through banning and restricting users and channels (Marantz, 2019). In 2018 for example, a number of large social media companies banned the high-profile conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his platform InfoWars from their platforms (Hern, 2018), while in 2019 the web infrastructure company Cloudflare deplatformed the controversial site 8chan (Prince, 2019). In 2020 a number of platforms even began regulating material from President Donald Trump, with Twitter placing fact-checks and warnings on some of his tweets and the platform Twitch temporarily suspending his account (Copland and Davis, 2020). As one of the largest digital platforms in the world, Reddit has not been immune from this pressure. Built upon a reputation of being a bastion of free speech (Ohanian, 2013), Reddit has historically resisted censoring its users, despite the prominence of racist, misogynistic, homophobic and explicitly violent material on the platform (for examples,
Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, suc... more Action on climate change has enjoyed popular support in most Western countries. Despite this, successive governments have struggled to implement policy to tackle this issue. Using the case of opposition to the Clean Energy Act, passed in Australia to establish an emissions trading scheme, this paper argues that a growing and broad sentiment of distrust in political elites, described as 'anti-politics', can explain some of this contradiction. Particular forms of climate policy, in particular emissions trading schemes, have been successfully framed as policies that appeal to the interests of a new class of liberal elites while hurting ordinary working people. This frame was used successfully in Australia by conservative forces to oppose the Clean Energy Act. While used cynically by political leaders in this case, the paper argues that anti-political sentiment reflects genuine concerns about the detachment between the state and voting population. This detachment is reflected in neoliberal climate policies. Through briefly examining the cases of the Trump Administration's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and the Gilets Jaunes protest movement, the paper argues that while formulating climate policy we must consider anti-political sentiment, developing responses to the climate crisis from a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.
The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women's lives... more The dramatic success of Gender Studies has rested on three developments: (1) making women's lives visible, which has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; (3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender. Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors, we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of modern life. This series embraces these advances in scholarship, and applies them to men's lives: gendering men's lives, exploring the rich diversity of men's lives-globally and locally, textually and practically-as well as the differences among men by class, race, sexuality, and age.
This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed... more This article investigates opposition to the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which surveyed Australians on their position on marriage equality from September to November 2017. Opposition to the hosting of a public vote on marriage equality was based in a perceived vulnerability of LGBTIQ Australians, with marriage equality advocates taking what Tietze (2016) described as a 'dark view of the voting public'. While acknowledging the high levels of homophobic rhetoric that occurred during the postal survey, and the impacts that public votes can have on the mental health of LGBTIQ people, the article argues this 'dark view' was overstated. This article argues that opposition to the survey reinforced vulnerability within LGBTIQ Australians, promoting an increased reliance on the state for protection and recognition. Opposition ignored the democratic potential of the survey, particularly as an opportunity to further debate on LGBTIQ issues and to reduce broader societal homophobia. Despite the eventual yes vote therefore, approaches to the postal survey missed a political opportunity, likely leaving LGBTIQ Australians and the Australian queer movement in a weaker position than previously.
Current research ethics processes, based on the mantra of privacy and institutional protection, t... more Current research ethics processes, based on the mantra of privacy and institutional protection, take a paternalistic approach to research participants that leaves them open to harm. Reflecting on our own research/consultancy as a case study to illustrate the current flaws, we explore our and our subjects’ experiences within the wider political context of institutional ethical rules and the Australian NHMRC guidelines. In doing so we argue for fundamental changes to the modern research ethics processes – a system that treats participants more as research collaborators rather than victims in waiting. A complete review of ethics processes is needed to empower participants and researchers to recognize the reality of the process as co-created and negotiated. This includes changes at the top level of research administration – a shift in ethics policies and procedures as well as greater education in ethics with commensurate trust for active researchers.
Bent Street is an annual publication of Australian LGBTIQA+ art, writing and ideas. We gather ess... more Bent Street is an annual publication of Australian LGBTIQA+ art, writing and ideas. We gather essays, fiction, poetry, artwork, reflections, letters, blog posts, interviews, performance writing and rants to bring you ‘The Year in Queer’. The first edition of Bent Street covers same-sex marriage in 2017, health and education, the meaning of queer history and progress; as well as presenting the queer imagination as it follows its own lights, digressions, yearnings, and strange associations.
Contributors
JOEL CREASEY
JILL JONES
GUY JAMES WHITWORTH
GENINE HOOK
TINA HEALY
APRIL WHITE
JEAN TAYLOR
ASHLEY SIEVWRIGHT
MANDY HENNINGHAM
TIFFANY JONES
DENNIS ALTMAN
STEVE R. E. PEREIRA
RENEE BENNETT
SIMON COPLAND
MARY LOU RASMUSSEN
QUINN EADES
ERROL BRAY
BLAIR ARCHBOLD
NIKKI SULLIVAN
CRAIG MIDDLETON
DANIEL MARSHALL
NADIA BAILEY
DOUG POLLARD
SALLY CONNING
BRIGITTE LEWIS
DANIEL WITTHAUS
MIRA SCHLOSBERG
CHRISTOPHER BRYANT
MICHAEL BERNARD KELLY
JESS JONES
RODNEY CROOME
...available from today at real world book shops like Hares and Hyenas, or online via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Book Depository.
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Papers by Simon Copland
ISBN: (paperback) 9781925283167 | ISBN: (ebook) 9781925283174
Publication date: December 2017
Contributors
JOEL CREASEY
JILL JONES
GUY JAMES WHITWORTH
GENINE HOOK
TINA HEALY
APRIL WHITE
JEAN TAYLOR
ASHLEY SIEVWRIGHT
MANDY HENNINGHAM
TIFFANY JONES
DENNIS ALTMAN
STEVE R. E. PEREIRA
RENEE BENNETT
SIMON COPLAND
MARY LOU RASMUSSEN
QUINN EADES
ERROL BRAY
BLAIR ARCHBOLD
NIKKI SULLIVAN
CRAIG MIDDLETON
DANIEL MARSHALL
NADIA BAILEY
DOUG POLLARD
SALLY CONNING
BRIGITTE LEWIS
DANIEL WITTHAUS
MIRA SCHLOSBERG
CHRISTOPHER BRYANT
MICHAEL BERNARD KELLY
JESS JONES
RODNEY CROOME
...available from today at real world book shops like Hares and Hyenas, or online via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the Book Depository.