The gaming media industry – like many other media industries – has been fundamentally transformed by the advent of new media and the widespread proliferation of internet technologies. The increasing prominence of platform powers, algorithmic influence and generative AI technologies has made it increasingly difficult for traditional forms of gaming media and journalism to survive; over the past year, multiple waves of layoffs have hit some of the largest publishers and sites in the field. With work becoming increasingly precarious and uncertain, many creators are embracing independence and striking out on their own.

This research is dedicated to analysing one specific subset of independent creator – creators of gaming podcasts – in order to better understand how these changes in online media industries are shaping how workers making a living in the ever-changing creator economy. Drawing on interviews with creators, surveys of listeners, and analysis of episodes, this work highlights the myriad of ways creators navigate the new media landscape. Particular attention is given to the monetization strategies of creators, showcasing how creators trade a traditional employment hierarchy for one governed by the platforms which they use to monetize their labour. In this way, the work of creators recalls Silvio Lorusso's discussion of the entreprecariat - a worker whose precarious work conditions are spun as entreprenurial opportunities.

These transformations are an important area of research with applications beyond the field of gaming media; as multiple creators pointed out in discussions, the shifts and transformations in this field are occurring in all areas of media. In this way, analysis of these podcasts can serve as an important case study which helps to further understand the ways the online media ecosystem is continuing to change, as well as the opportunities and issues that arise as a result of these transformations.

A paradigm shift in film censorship in China is surfacing, since the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed responsibility for supervising film censorship from the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) in 2018. Practitioners in the film industry have experienced gradual yet drastic changes in censorship criteria, which has resulted in an increasingly restrictive environment where filmmakers find it more challenging to create censorship-free contents.

Traditionally, media in China has been regarded as the "tongue and throat" of the Party, a concept rooted in Marxist ideology. This role was primarily fulfilled by state-owned news media such as Xinhua Agency, China Central Television, and official newspaper publishers. Ironically, in 2017, Film Industry Promotion Law’ implemented by the State Council served as an de-facto extension of the “tongue and throat” policy to the broader film industry is threatening its vitality by reducing creative works to mere propaganda vehicles that only convey government-approved narratives.

This project argues that the observed paradigm shift in film censorship is intrinsically linked to the evolving political environment in China. It reflects the government's intensified efforts to exert greater control over the cultural industry, a move that coincides with the ongoing reform of China Central Television Station. The transformation from a system where filmmakers could create anything not explicitly forbidden to one where they can only produce what is explicitly allowed represents a fundamental change in China's approach to cultural regulation.

The implications of this shift are affecting not only the creative freedom of filmmakers but also the diversity and vitality of the Chinese film industry. This research explores the mechanisms behind this change, its impact on the film industry, and its broader significance in the context of China's cultural policies, aiming to shed light on the complex dynamics among state control, industry prosperity, and cultural identity in contemporary China.

While current scholarship has explored the international distribution of Chinese dramas and their cultural messaging, less attention has been given to the tangible effects of state regulations on production and global reach. This study takes a different approach by focusing on the impact of Chinese government regulations, particularly following the 2019 costume drama ban (later rescinded), on the production and international distribution of Chinese costume dramas.

Through a multi-method approach combining analysis of academic literature, policy documents, and in-depth interviews with historical and costume consultants, this research traces the evolution of Chinese costume drama production. It examines how media industries navigate regulatory constraints and adapt content for both domestic and international markets, with a particular focus on the role of streaming platforms and short video formats in responding to or circumventing these restrictions.

Preliminary findings suggest these regulatory constraints have led to an increased emphasis on historical accuracy and innovative production strategies. While initially driven by financial interests, the adaptations made by streaming platforms and production teams have inadvertently promoted Chinese aesthetics, philosophy, and culture. This outcome aligns with the Chinese state's broader goal of enhancing cultural influence, revealing an unintended convergence between market strategies and state objectives. The regulatory frameworks have also reshaped the creative labour landscape, integrating academic expertise into the media industry.

The contributions of this research are threefold: it advances our understanding of the intersection between state regulations and media production, particularly within the context of Chinese costume dramas; it integrates fashion, media, and cultural policy studies to analyse how regulatory frameworks shape media production practices and international distribution; and it provides insights into the adaptive strategies of media companies and the role of creative labour in responding to regulatory constraints, offering a nuanced perspective on the relationship between state policy and cultural production.

Repositories of open knowledge, such as Wikipedia, are increasingly used as data sources for commercial products like knowledge graphs, virtual assistants and generative AI (Ford & Iliadis, 2023). However, the demands of expediency are threatening critical elements of the open knowledge ecosystem in what McDowell and Vetter (2023) have recently called the ‘re-alienation of the commons’.

In this paper we focus on verifiability, a key element of the open knowledge ecosystem. On Wikipedia, for example, where it is a core content policy, verifiability underpins both the epistemic value of Wikipedia itself and of Wikipedia data that is extracted for use in other systems. All contestable claims on Wikipedia must be attributed to reliable sources, enabling a system of public verification. But with the rise of ‘knowledge as a service’ (Zia et al., 2019), verifiability is under threat – apparent in unreliable or non-existent attribution and in obstructed pathways to participation in the epistemic commons. Beyond this looms the threat of increased privatisation and sequestration of open knowledge into a landscape of digital walled gardens.

Through a framework grounded in social epistemology, this paper articulates the value of verifiability as both moral and epistemic, in the sense that impeding access to communal processes of verifiability could be considered an injustice, leading to the unequal distribution of epistemic value (van den Hoven & Rooksby, 2008). This situates our work among recent scholarship on epistemic rights (Flew, 2024; Nieminen, 2024) and duties to mitigate AI-generated ‘careless speech’ (Wachter et al., 2024). We also consider how AI companies’ power to transform the structure of the knowledge ecosystem (Lazar & Bullock, 2022) demands a regulatory focus on defining and managing the appropriate limits of that power.

Policymaking for the Internet is complex and contested (Kettemann, 2020, Belli et al, 2023). This paper explores the impact of emerging technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI), on Internet Policy.

The infrastructure underlying and essential for AI systems includes data, compute capacity, underlying connectivity and workforce (Hammond-Errey 2023). These are referred to collectively as the ‘architecture of AI’ Hammond-Errey 2024).

Considering these aspects collectively as the architecture of AI enables us to examine broader consideration of the actors (companies and individuals) who are involved in AI and the technologies and supply chains it relies on. It also encourages us to explore the potential changes of AI and its underlying infrastructures and architectures and their implications for internet policy.

This paper argues that the architecture and infrastructures of AI should be considered as essential digital services. These digital infrastructures are just as essential as energy or water for society but are not considered ‘utilities’ and so the provision of their services is not standardised or regulated. While they are often considered in terms of critical infrastructure, the architecture of AI that underpin these digital platforms are broader and in critical need of stable, reliable provision. Unlike traditional utilities like telecommunications, water and energy, digital platforms have solely been created in the commercial space. Cases like the recent Google anti-trust ruling and the CrowdStrike outage shine a light on the need to standardise the supply of digital services (Hammond-Errey 2024b).

The Hollywood Writers Strike of 2022 drew attention to the extent of the emerging conflicts between creative workers and major creative industries forms over how artificial intelligence (AI) may be used in current and future creative work. While earlier debates about the impacts of AI, machine learning and robotics on the future of work tended to differentiate between unskilled and semi-skilled work, which was seen as highly susceptible to automation, and creative work which was seen to be largely immune (Frey and Obsorne, 2013), the rise of Generative AI has drawn attention to the degree to which automated text, sounds and images may substitute directly for human labour.

This paper will examine some of the tools which are available using AI for creative work, ranging from those where there is a long history of application, such as virtual reality and digital effects, to those which can be directly substituted for creative work, including content creation and information enhancement tools. It will consider different approaches to the relationship between people and technology in creative work, from those who stress the uniqueness of human capabilities (Anantrasiricha and Bull, 2022; Fjelland, 2020), to those who have long stressed how augmentary digital technologies fundamentally shape human creative capacities at any given time (Boden, 2014; Lee, 2022). It will also note that sitting under the general umbrella term "creative work" are a range of both highly abstract and specialised activities and those of a more mundane nature, with the latter particularly susceptible to transformation through AI.

Data has become a core source of modern power. It underpins global trade, the management of power grids and technological innovation. Data's significance has been accelerated with the rise to prominence of artificial intelligence and the ratcheting up of geopolitical tensions. How governments approach data will be instrumental to internet policy and shape the very functioning of our future societies.

This paper maps out how different governments perceive data and considers the resulting implications for governance of the internet and the modern digital economy. It highlights different policy approaches to data inputs and sources; infrastructure for storage and analysis; and data end-uses. Drawing on a combination of key interviews, scholarly research and data analysis, it focuses on the United States, Australia, the European Union and the United Kingdom as central case studies.

Sources for data are expanding through new inputs (such as connected vehicles or consumer neurotechnology) and aggressive use of existing inputs (such as web scraping). In addition, the capabilities and infrastructure that collects, transports, stores and analyses data are increasingly concentrated amongst a small set of technology companies and data brokers, while government concerns around sovereignty and data security are simultaneously rising. Finally, new uses for data – from creating deepfakes to tracking CO2 emissions – continue to grow. Taken together, these changes place data squarely at the centre of internet policy debates, which are also being shaped by other dynamics in governments and the private sector.

Drawing on this taxonomy, this paper considers how this new framing of ‘data as power’ is impacting domestic and international policymaking across the globe, and what that means for internet policy. Failing to understand how governments consider data imperils any effort to bring together different governments and governance mechanisms to build cohesive internet policy that ensures a free and open internet, and global digital economy.

The perils of online communications have led to growing calls to regulate social media platforms. Even scholars who have been ardent advocates of internet non-regulation (Balkin, 2020) are now writing about how the internet requires some regulation. While platform self-regulation always existed, state regulation is taking centre stage. State legislation often falls short because traditional laws are not well suited for these new technologies (Ghosh, 2021). Set in the context of this regulatory challenge, this paper examines India’s Information Technology Act, 2008, which regulates social media platforms and the intermediary responses to said liabilities.

Guided by the specific questions of: i) how does the Indian state expect social media platforms to regulate content? and ii) how do platforms comply with the liabilities imposed? We undertake three sets of document analyses running 236 pages. First, an analysis of India’s Information Technology (IT) (Amendment) Act, 2008 and IT Rules to understand Indian state’s expectations. Second, an analysis of monthly compliance reports of X (formerly Twitter), WhatsApp, and ShareChat, scheduled as significant social media platforms by the legislation. We deemed these compliance reports a reliable source as they correspond to the legal compliance requirements and would allow us to spot the gaps in policy and practice and . Delineating data from the compliance report into proactive and reactive monitoring, we argue that there seems to be no common understanding of the regulatory expectations among these platforms. Questioning such variations, a third set of document analyses of the said platforms’ About Us pages and their content policies, along with reading scholarly works on the evolution of the platforms, allowed us to chart the platform’s technical, social, and economic characteristics. We find that a diverse understanding of the same regulatory expectation is embedded in the distinct socialities (van Dijck, 2013) offered by the platforms, which shape and are facilitated by the technical architecture. It further impinges upon their content policies and supports the platform’s business model (Postigo, 2014), making legislative compliance difficult.

Thus, we question the legislative efficacy of classifying all social media platforms into one aggregated category and framing common rules. We make a case for the legislative limitations of intermediary liabilities and also bring to the fore the limitations of self-regulation by platforms. These limitations put healthy digital communication at stake.

The intersection of internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI), and the burgeoning volume of data raises significant research concerns, particularly regarding privacy and data transfer misuse. AI systems are increasingly reliant on vast datasets, and when combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), they create an environment ripe for both innovation and risk. The three Vs of big data—volume, variety, and velocity—are particularly relevant here. The sheer amount of data (volume) used for training AI models, the diverse types of data (variety) that enable complex inferences, and the rapid pace of data processing and sharing (velocity) all contribute to potential privacy and infrastructure issues (Kerry, 2020).

Legally, the protection of privacy and data varies globally. Although privacy is a recognized human right under documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1948) and the European Convention on Human Rights (Council of Europe, 1950), data protection laws, such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), differ in scope and enforcement (Keane, 2021). These regulations aim to specify data collection practices, retention periods, and consent requirements (Zenonos, 2022). And facilitate emerging privacy-preserving machine learning and differential privacy techniques, such as introducing noise to data to obscure individual identities in case of data breaches (Wood et al., 2018).

However, the infrastructure of the internet itself with the explosion of data caused by AI usage, and the emerging growth of privacy transfer protocols being attached onto information slows, clogs or overloaded the pipelines of the internet itself. As the “internet” gets overloaded, it risks net neutrality and give rise to another splitter from the world wide web internet commonly used. Rather, the mentality to add more to protect privacy is having downstream effects affect its result. Therefore, the need to consider privacy by design (PbD) (Cavoukian, 2020) and down coding, or making code into is a minimally needed state, to reduce excess data being transferred is discussed as a way to consider privacy policy.

Reference

Cavoukian, A. (2020). Understanding how to implement privacy by design, one step at a time. IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine, 9(2), 78-82.

Council of Europe (1950) European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as amended by Protocols Nos. 11 and 14. Available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3b04.html (accessed 2 August 2024).

Keane J (2021) From California to Brazil: GDPR has created recipe for the world. Available at: https://www.cnbc. com/2021/04/08/from-california-to-brazil-gdpr-has-created-recipe-for-the-world.html (accessed 2 August 2024).

Kerry C (2020) Protecting privacy in an AI-driven world. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/research/protectingprivacy-in-an-ai-driven-world/ (accessed 2 August 2024).

United Nations General Assembly (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. United Nations. Available at: https://www. un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights (accessed 2 August 2024).

Wood A, Altman M, Bembenek A, et al. (2018) Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-Technical Audience. Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law. Available at: http://privacytools.seas.harvard.edu (accessed 2 August 2024).

Zenonos A (2022) Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection. Available at: https://towardsdatascience.com/artificialintelligence-and-data-protection-62b333180a27 (accessed 2 August 2024).

Cries of news media in crisis have been such a mainstay of public discussion that they have come to characterise much of the history of journalism, but the reliability of this condition can mask underlying conditions that are indeed shifting substantially, with challenges for consumers, governments, and the media organisations themselves. With the commercial model for funding journalism facing increasing struggles, there has been a recent rise in governments adopting subsidies to support both consumers and media producers as the news increasingly moves to online spaces. Frequently labelled ‘innovation’ subsidies and funds, these approaches are diverse but share some core characteristics. In this research, I conducted policy analysis on direct and indirect subsidies arising in Australia, the UK, Canada, NZ, Norway, Belgium, and South Korea to identify those policies with an explicit focus on innovation and digital transition. An examination of policy documents and related material finds that adaption to and adoption of digital media production and distribution are framed as inevitable, but interventions to support changes tend to be time limited and narrow in scope, as well as frequently focusing on existing media organisations in legacy media. This study seeks to identify where the policy objectives are disconnected from the execution of the subsidies and what that means for the potential impact of the subsidies as well as how subsidies might be shaped for better results in the future.

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.

China's governance of Internet content has been considered to follow a state-controlled, top-down model(Qiu & Bu, 2013). Content platforms serve not only as infrastructure for cultural production, but also as an effective tool for state management of public affairs(Zheng & Huang, 2018). However, the tightening of governance and the fast growth of the digital culture industries happened at the same time. The effective monetization strategies of platforms have generated economic value and serving as a significant channel for propagating ideology(Chen et al., 2021).

To understand the integration of the state role on Chinese platforms, our study poses the following questions: 1) How does the state delineate its governance responsibilities and boundaries? 2) How is the state role integrated through self-regulation of the platforms? 3) What other stakeholders perceive the state's roles in the content production process?

Building on Schwarz (2017), our study examines official content governance documents and conducts Douyin as an in-depth case study. We investigate Douyin's regulatory strategies and the perspectives of MCNs on these regulations. Interviews with 10 MCN employees and 14 Douyin influencers shed light on their responses to these policies.

Our study finds out: 1) The analysis of state policies indicates that the subject of content regulation primarily targets content platforms directly, with minimal involvement of specific users or groups. The state typically sets the "bottom-line" as the standard for platform regulations. 2) The analysis of regulatory documents released by Douyin reveals that the platform adheres to the "bottom-line" set by the state while also making additional provisions according to its business needs. 3) The state roles in content platform regulation can be categorized into two forms: routine governance and emergency governance. These alternating forms of governance illustrate how the state, as a formal authority, grants the digital content industry space for economic development while promptly asserting its authority, when necessary, thereby realigning content governance processes to align with national interests.

Refereces

1. Qiu, J. L., & Bu, W. (2013). China ICT studies: A review of the field, 1989–2012. China Review, 13(2), 123-152.

2. Zheng, Y., & Huang, Y. (2018). Market in state: The political economy of domination in China. Cambridge University Press.

3. Chen, X., Valdovinos Kaye, D. B., & Zeng, J. (2021, 2021/01/02). #PositiveEnergy Douyin: constructing “playful patriotism” in a Chinese short-video application. Chinese Journal of Communication, 14(1), 97-117.

4. Schwarz, J. (2017, 08/03). Platform Logic: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Platform-Based Economy: Platform Logic. Policy & Internet, 9.

Democratic societies are dealing with increasing polarization, misinformation, radicalization and hatespeech. To deal with current social disorders, platforms and governments are expected to intervene. Their solutions are however challenged by the cross-border character of the digital space, where national regulations can cause internet fragmentation. Furthermore, uniform platform interventions can enforce culturally insensitive top-down constraints. While there is no immediate solution to avoid the fragmentation of the web through regulation on one hand, and curb the authoritarian power platforms have over user behavior on the other hand, there is an opportunity to improve the possibilities users have to self-regulate and increase culture-sensitivity in content moderation. Helberger, Pierson & Poell (2018) have also called for such a cooperative responsibility of users, platforms and public institutions in governing platforms. One of the ways humans have always self-regulated in the offline world is through social norms. This is also possible in the online world, but is dependent on the architectures of platforms and what it affords users to do. Platforms have an obligation to create the conditions that allow individual users to comply with their societal responsibilities; and lawmakers can be an important instituting agent to enforce platforms to design for such social norm shaping by users. There currently seems to be very little reflection in policy discourses how users can to take up their share of the cooperative responsibility of platform governance. To test this assumption, we look at the most recent and comprehensive regulations of platforms up to now, the EU’s Digital Services Act, to assess the current attitude of European policymakers and investigate where their thinking is on designing architectures for user participation. By reflecting on the provisions in this legal document, we aim to contribute to future policymaking that is inspired by informal constraint mechanisms like social norms.

Helberger, N., Pierson, J., & Poell, T. (2018). Governing online platforms: From contested to cooperative responsibility. The Information Society, 34(1), 1–14.

On August 19th, 2019, YouTube filed a lawsuit against Minecraft YouTuber Christopher Brady for fraudulently copyright claiming, financially extorting, and doxxing fellow members of the Minecraft community in what a company spokesperson described as a case of “particularly egregious abuse” (Alexander, 2019). Despite growing concern with the appropriation of platform governance tools from users, policymakers, and academics, we lack specificity around what it means to abuse these tools. As Crawford and Gillespie observe, “flags can have many meanings and functions, and users’ engagement with flags can be both individual and social” (2016, p. 421). Furthermore, unlike other types of content moderation systems, copyright is governed by stricter legal frameworks that require greater transparency in reporting and harsher consequences for violations (Gray, 2020). With recent work on platform governance calling for more transparent content moderation (Are, 2023, Zolides, 2023), copyright reporting tools provide an ideal case to test how greater transparency requirements shape the abuse of platform governance and surface competing socio-legal norms.

Through an integrative analysis of 154 transnational copyright controversies documented on Wikitubia, a fan wiki dedicated to YouTube, we investigate the “cultures of compliance” associated with copyright on the platform (Gillett et al., 2023). While some controversies involved commercial rightsholders, a majority focused on individual creators. YouTubers were identified as targets and perpetrators of copyright abuse, fighting and filing unfair claims against ideological opponents, economic rivals, and even former friends. We locate contested copyright claims on a spectrum ranging from accidental misuse, such as when ContentID erroneously flags a creator’s original song as a copyright violation, to intentional abuse, exemplified by Brady’s extortion of fellow Minecraft YouTubers. However, most documented controversies fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, a gray zone where people disagree on what constitutes legitimate use. We argue that structural differences in copyright enforcement systems fail to prevent individual harm and also heighten the collective stakes of abuse, threatening to undermine the political-economic and socio-technical systems on which the platform economy depends.

Alexander, J. (2019, August 19). YouTube sues alleged copyright troll over extortion of multiple YouTubers / Chris Brady seemed to target the Minecraft community, according to the suit. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812144/youtube-copyright-strike-lawsuit-alleged-extortion-minecraft

Are, C. (2023). The assemblages of flagging and de-platforming against marginalised content creators. Convergence, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231218629.

Crawford, K., & Gillespie, T. (2016). What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint. New Media & Society, 18(3), 410–428. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814543163

Gillett, R., Gray, J. E., & Valdovinos Kaye, D. B. (2023). ‘Just a little hack’: Investigating cultures of content moderation circumvention by Facebook users. New Media & Society, online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221147661

Gray, J. E. (2020). Google Rules: The History and Future of Copyright Under the Influence of Google (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190072070.001.0001

Zolides, A. (2023). Toxic community policing: Weaponizing moderation tools on Twitch. In J. Brewer, B. Ruberg, A. L. L. Cullen, & C. J. Persaud (Eds.), Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture (pp. 131–144). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/14526.003.0013

Author Bios:

Blake Hallinan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and a member of the ERC-funded DigitalValues project. They direct the Participatory Platform Governance Lab, researching how users experience, negotiate, and transform the normative standards governing public life on digital platforms.

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds working on the ERC-funded MUSICSTREAM project (2022-2026), focusing mainly on aspects related to the music industries, music creators, and public policy.

CJ Reynolds is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem researching responses to institutional mistrust and failure in state and platform contexts.

Xinyue Shen is a Master’s student in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He researches the contemporary cultures of love and intimacy in East Asia, with a focus on the subjectification function of media.

This paper expores the intricate ethical dimensions surrounding the right to be excluded from the information society and an analogue life in the context of the rapidly evolving information age. The Information Society (IS), characterised by extensive digital connectivity and technological advancements, presents both advantages and challenges. As detailed in the literature review, the IS represents a web of inequality, shaped by interwoven social, economic, cultural, and geographical factors that creates an inequitable access to technology broadly termed as the ‘digital divide’ (Van Dijk, 2006). The same literature suggests that individual hesitancy toward technology, whether due to fear, scepticism, or a lack of perceived benefit, needs addressing (Ragnedda and Muschert, 2013).

While IS offers improved communication, access to knowledge, and economic opportunities, it also raises concerns related to privacy, data protection, social equity, or individual autonomy, among others. The former has led to a number of recent ‘opposition movements’ in several countries. A noticeable trend also shows that individuals are increasingly seeking analogue experiences, such as attending unplugged retreats or spending time offline to focus on personal relationships, favouring traditional mediums like books, vinyl records, and handwritten materials over digital alternatives. This preference underscores for example the European Economic and Social Committee's (EESC, 2019) stance that the digital transition should incorporate analogue elements to be broadly accepted, cautioning against an over-reliance on digital replacements.

Examining this ethical conundrum, the paper navigates through philosophical foundations and uses six ethical lenses (utilitarian, contractualist, deontological, virtue, discourse, and care ethics), to discuss the balance between individual rights and societal interests. While recognizing the potential productivity and other benefits and cost savings associated with digitalisation, the paper contends that safeguarding individual freedom, even at a fractional cost of financial and social capital, is paramount in a democratic society.

The concluding remarks underscore the complex and multifaceted nature of the right to be excluded from the information society and an analogue life. It calls for inclusive policy making within ethical frameworks that strike a delicate balance between individual preferences and societal interests in an evolving digital landscape and eventually for the establishment of a human right to analogue life similar to the one recently enacted in the Constitution of Geneva for a ‘droit à une vie hors ligne’ (Article 21A). This invocation of a right to be excluded from the IS and an analogue life does not represent a Luddite retreat from technology, but rather a selective engagement on one's own terms. In this light, the right to exclusion becomes an essential counterbalance to the information society's overreach, providing a necessary space for individuality, creativity, and critical thought.

The Internet spread at a time where globalization was rampant and multistakeholder and global private sector governance institutions were on the rise (Scholte, 2004; Abbott and Snidal, 2008). The early stages of the diffusion of the Internet at a planetary scale was met with several types of responses across levels and actors. The Tunis Agenda of 2005 set the foundations for adopting Internet policies across all levels, including the national, in alignment with human rights and sustainable development objectives. Through ideas concerning the principle of subsidiarity of Internet policies at the national level, national actors were encouraged to apply the WSIS recommendations (Radu, 2019). As the norms emerged, new policy instruments had to be designed for this new issue.

From a national actors' perspective, digital agendas emerged as one of these instruments in the immediate post-WSIS scenario. Digital agendas are understudied in the ways in which they frame and approach Internet policy, both nationally and internationally, and how they may contribute to the formation of certain normative preferences on what the Internet means or may help a country to accomplish (Broeders, 2015). The first such experience was registered in the EU, with the eEurope initiative of 1999 as a forerunner of the digital agenda 2010-2020 (Petit et al, 2024). This work examines the diffusion of norms and ideas that emerged in the post WSIS period and their shaping of national digital agendas using Uruguay as a study case. By analyzing this example, and contrasting it with a similar experience of continuity in the EU, this work aims to address the extent in which a national digital agenda is relevant for rendering visible state actors’ preferences on Internet policy.

Uruguay is somewhat of an outlier in the Latin American context. A small country of 176,000 km2, 3.4 million inhabitants, it is comparatively rich and developed (both economically and digitally from human development (HDI) and ICT Development Index (IDI), and with a welfare state tradition (Midaglia et al., 2017). Uruguay embraced its first digital agenda in 2007, which has been an ongoing, updated and uninterrupted policy instrument in several versions since then (AGESIC, 2020).

The Uruguayan national agenda has been both a driver as well as a foundation for cooperation and governance mechanisms in regional and global internet governance, with the involvement in venues such as the IGF MAG, the group of Digital Nations (D9) and the ECLAC’s information society instrument in the region, eLAC. As figure 1 shows, interdependencies between eLAC and the national agenda are particularly noteworthy and have ascertained the stages in the institutionalization of the construction of a norm (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). We argue that this phenomenon is due to norm entrepreneurs on both institutional processes and the continuity of the leadership.

The continuity of a national digital agenda is a unique case in global majority contexts and even in Latin America, where countries with similar Internet and developmental indicators have not continued with this policy tool to shape their strategic priorities.

Empirical questions that we address in this study include: Which were the key processes, institutions and stakeholders that contributed to the continuity and consolidation of the national digital policy? Which were the internal and external political and economic factors that have allowed Uruguay to maintain a continuous policy since 2007 vis-a-vis other countries in Latin America? How was the Uruguayan digital agenda articulated with international and national issues concerning the Internet? What are the lessons for other countries in the region and in global majority contexts that aim to develop and/or sustain digital agendas? To accomplish the above, this work will develop an in-depth case study of Uruguay based on extensive document analysis and content analysis relating to the national digital agenda (i.e., issue attention, Bevan, 2019), as well as interviews with key stakeholders for its development and monitoring.

We argue that the real strength of the Uruguayan digital agenda process lies not so much in the initial configuration of an agenda, but in the continuity of an institutionally recognized and embedded policy space. As figure 2 and 3 show, this continuity has first enabled the emergence, and then the consolidation of a national policy for the Internet, in terms of stages of Internet development, numbers of goals and issue attention per agenda. These have become broader to encompass not only standards and infrastructure concerns, but increasingly skills and capabilities.

Our study also suggests that Uruguay’s slow consolidation of a welfare state for over one century is a factor that frames its preferences for the national digital agenda to become a cross-cutting instrument for many of its health, social and educational policies.

Empirically we aim to contribute to the Internet policy literature by helping to identify the role of national digital agendas in the definition of priorities, in tracing the normative preferences of the actors involved, and in assessing degrees of influence and interdependencies across the national and international levels. Conceptually, the work will contribute in filling a gap on the “normfare” on Internet policy (Radu et a., 2021) by examining the subsidiarity of Internet policies at the national level and the formation of state preferences on the Internet in the tradition of liberalism in IR (Giannone, Santaniello, 2018).

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