The topic of online pornography has been the subject of media panics, policy, and regulatory reform ever since the early days of the internet. Concerns about young people in particular accessing sexually explicit content online have led to political debate about suitable legislative and policy frameworks to protect young people online. This has ranged from political deliberations in the mid-2000s towards mandating ISP level filtering (which was never actually implemented) to more recent debates about restricting young people’s access to such material via age-verification methods.

Underpinning many of these arguments and policy initiatives is an implicit assumption that pornography is harmful and therefore access should be restricted. This paper interrogates some of these assumptions, drawing on existing studies to demonstrate the nuanced ways in which people talk about their engagements with pornography. For example, many young people find intentionally accessing online pornography pleasurable and interesting. Many people, especially LGBTQI+ youth use pornography to learn about sex and explore their developing sexualities (eSafety Commissioner, 2023). These findings highlight the importance of digital sexual literacy – that is, how Australians both consume digital sexual images and represent themselves as sexual beings in digital contexts – not just among young people but among people at various stages of the life course.

This paper will outline the purpose and approach of a project aimed at exploring digital sexual literacies amongst Australians and what it means for healthy sexual development. Our ARC Discovery Project: Digital sexually explicit material and sexual health in Australia – will provide valuable data to stakeholders including policymakers, public servants, sex educators, health promotion practitioners and researchers about the ways in which Australians are consuming and producing sexual representations in a digital context, and the role of sexual literacy in healthy sexual development.

eSafety Commissioner (2023). Accidental, unsolicited and in your face. Young people’s encounters with online pornography: a matter of platform responsibility, education and choice. Canberra. Australian Government

Abstract:

Online gambling sites are well-regulated in Australia and most nations, generally requiring passports, drivers licenses, credit cards or equivalents as proof of ID, and as a means to prevent young people from accessing these platforms. The same cannot, however, be said of gambling videos on sites like YouTube, Twitch, Kick and TikTok, which have emerged in recent years to become a significant area of concern. In such videos influencers and microcelebrities showcase themselves engaging in real-money gambling, sometimes for small stakes but sometimes for amounts in the five or even-six figures. Some of these videos are also "live streams", watched by viewers who not just see and hear the live streamer gambling, but also interact with them in real-time. Although digital gambling has seen a tremendous amount of scholarship, and live streaming and widespread internet video use itself exhibits a large and rapidly-growing body of research, this particular intersection of the two has remained, until now, wholly unstudied.

This talk will therefore present some of the key findings from the first investigation of online gambling video content produced by "gambling influencers", recently funded by the New South Wales Office of Responsible Gambling. I will highlight our findings regarding the sorts of gambling activities being broadcast, the demographics and motivations of viewers, the controversies around addiction and age-gating already emerging in this space - and most fundamentally, some of the key policy challenges to regulating and legislating the ability for young people to view this content. At present there is absolutely no age restriction on watching gambling content - often broadcast by charismatic influencers and "content creators" - and it therefore represents an important area of emerging technology use, with a strong public interest and public health dimension, which is only now beginning to see attention.

Bio:

Dr Mark Johnson is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. He has published extensively on live streaming, Twitch.tv and esports in journals including “Information, Communication and Society”, “New Media and Society”, “Media, Culture and Society”, “Television and New Media”, “Convergence” and “Games and Culture”. His most recent book, "Twitch", has just been published by Polity Press, giving a foundational and up-to-the-minute appraisal of the platform. Outside academia he is also an independent game designer best known for the roguelike “Ultima Ratio Regum”.

This project is the first to systematically investigate how algorithmic content recommendation is shaping everyday Australian cultural experience over time, in the particular context of TikTok—the digital platform where Australians spend the most time online. Its methodological innovations directly address the challenges of studying commercial platforms' recommender systems through a mixed-method research design combining computational and qualitative analysis, bridging universal and individual perspectives and introducing ‘citizen science’ approaches to the field of platform studies. TikTok provides the ideal case for this study because this platform has been at the centre of recent debates over national security and algorithmic cultures, it has a large global and Australian user base, and it is built on one of the most sophisticated recommender systems in the market. This project will be the first to generate systematic evidence about how TikTok, a globally powerful and locally popular platform, is influencing Australian culture. It investigates the output of the platform’s recommender system, the content it recommends to Australian audiences, and the strategies that local creators are employing to reach them. The findings of the research will help Australian content creators to better understand how to succeed on the platform, and improve the Australian public’s understanding of algorithmic recommender systems more broadly. The project will also help inform Australian government initiatives, including the national Digital Economy and AI Regulation strategies and ACCC Digital Platform Services Inquiry; as well as providing advice about the likely local impacts of international developments such as the incoming EU Digital Services Act. Overall, the project provides critical evidence to support ongoing policy initiatives intended to regulate the activities of digital platforms in Australia and globally.

In July 2024, the Australian government amended its Basic Online Safety Expectations to ensure that “the best interests of the child are a primary consideration in the design and operation of any service likely to be accessed by children” (Australian Government 2024). This change is in step with global regulatory shifts mandating ‘safety by design’, such as the UK’s Online Safety Bill (2023) which imposes a duty of care on online service providers requiring them to conduct comprehensive risk assessments for different age groups and take appropriate action to protect against both illegal and lawful yet harmful technologies. This creates an urgent need to examine how children experience and conceptualize harm, which may differ from parent (and media) perceptions.

In our presentation, we will present the results of a study into children’s experiences with game monetization. This study involved 20 semi-structured interviews with children aged 7-14 and their parents. The interviews focused on children’s experiences with playing and spending in digital games, and how parents approach and navigate their child’s in-game spending. To go beyond abstracted ideas about spending, during the interviews -following a ‘think-aloud method’ - children were given an AUD $20 voucher to spend however they liked, where they would discuss their purchasing considerations and decisions with the researcher.

Through an analysis of our participants’ (aged 7-14) vernacular of ‘scams’, we argue that children experience harm principally through microtransactions being misleading or ambiguous, rather than being due to what parents perceive as a misattribution of value toward digital items. Based on these results, we make recommendations for policy and game design to minimize harmful experiences for children with game monetization strategies.

News consumption and visibility on social media platforms has received sustained scholarly attention for over a decade now, with particular interest focusing on the production, distribution and visibility of news on these algorithmically mediated platforms. Over this time social media platforms have become a popular source of news media for emerging news audiences, thanks in part to these platforms’ early promise of new audiences and extended reach. Recently though, platforms such as Meta-owned Facebook have begun to deprioritise news content via changes to their opaque content recommender systems, arguing that news content makes up a small fraction of the content that their users engage with and therefore they do not extract more value from news content appearing on their platforms than news producers do. Lost in these arguments of the value of news to social media platform owners are questions around the central role that professional news media content plays in other content generated by influencers, public figures and other everyday social media users in the form of memes, hot takes, and casual conversations. This paper provides insights from a digital ethnography of 13 emerging news users into the ways in which they are able to keep up with trending topics and breaking news through cultural commentary content on social media without engaging with professional news content. By highlighting how cultural commentary content contributes to ambient journalism environments on social media platforms, I argue for an expansion of what should be considered news content in scholarly research. This has implications for ongoing debates around news visibility and the value of news content to social media platforms, debates that have driven arguments for and against news bargaining codes in various global markets such as Australia, Canada, and California.