Search

In this dialogue, Terry Flew first outlines “a synoptic history” of the dominant discourses on Internet regulation. By exploring the global experiences over the past decades, Flew then articulates “the third way” of global Internet governance. Differing from both the “Silicon Valley” model of the United States and the state-led Chinese model, “the third way” is proposed to be built on trust and regulation. The typology of Internet governance addresses the tension between the nation-state and global market and emphasizes the balance between communication technology and law. Flew further elaborates on the importance of the multi-stakeholder approach in the future of global Internet governance and the challenges such an approach is facing. In addition, Flew offers advice on further research in Internet governance and platform regulation.

Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian ‘news ban’ exposed the limits of a regulatory model that has previously left the tech industry to moderate itself. In this paper, we argue the introduction of the Code is a leading example of a global trajectory towards regulatory change, which sees governments move from a reactive regulation model to specific interventions around the governance of digital media spaces. We discuss how best to measure the successes and failures around this more interventionist model through a case study of the implementation of the Code in Australia. More broadly we consider how global platforms have responded, and whether the reform is an effective regulatory model for other national governments to emulate.

This essay introduces the special issue of Media International Australia dedicated to the work of Stuart Cunningham. We note the scholarly contributions made by Stuart Cunningham to communications, media and cultural studies, including screen studies, creative industries and cultural policy studies. We also note his extensive contributions to institution building and academic leadership in engaging with industry and policy agencies from an applied humanities perspective.

In this short paper, I want to consider the ways in which Stuart Cunningham's focus on work that was policy-relevant and could speak to industry led him to an ambivalent relationship with the discipline of economics. Rejecting the binary opposition between alleged ‘neoliberal’ economics and the cultural sphere as a site of unbridled moral good, Cunningham sought to both engage with and critique the dominant paradigms of economics, and their influence in Australian public policy. In doing so, his work is strongly influenced by Ian Hunter's argument that scholarly work motivated by civically minded engagements with matters of public concern needed to go beyond moral grandstanding and engage critically with the institutional complexities of social and cultural governance.

Review of: Advanced Introduction to Platform Economics, Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller (2020)Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 176 pp.,ISBN 978-1-78990-062-0, p/bk, £15.95

This article identifies a ‘policy turn’ in questions of internet governance, as politicians and policy-makers across multiple jurisdictions grapple with the power of digital platforms, and associated questions of accountability, transparency, market dominance and content regulation. The EU Hate Speech monitoring code, the Christchurch Call, the UK Online Harms Bill and Australia’s ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry are manifestations of this trend, in what Philip Schlesinger has described as an emergent ‘regulatory field’. While corporate self-regulation has tended to be the dominant framework for digital sectors, there is growing pressure on the part of nation states for greater external regulation. In this article, we will consider different conceptual premises for understanding platform power, arising from neo-pluralist, class and elite theories, as well as the relative significance of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), nation state governments, corporate self-regulation (e.g. Facebook Oversight Board) and supranational governance mechanisms, such as Tim Berners-Lee’s proposed ‘Contract for the Web’.

The concept of creative industries is now well established in both academic and policy discourse. Historically, it had its roots in the policies of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” governments of the United Kingdom during the late 1990s and 2000s. Its creative industries policies were in turn influenced by culture-led urban renewal strategies in major UK cities such as Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow, as well as by economically oriented cultural policy strategies such as the Australian government’s 1994 Creative Nation program. In the 2000s, there was a significant process of international diffusion of creative industries policies. Tafel-Viia et. al. identified such policies being developed in 11 leading European cities: Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Birmingham, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Warsaw. There have also been important regional and national policies developed in European nations including the UK, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Russia, and creative industries have been at the forefront of the European Union’s Creative Europe strategies as part of the Horizon 2020 program.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic., PNAS Nexus, 1 (3), ISSN:2752-6542

The arts, cultural and creative industries are among the most adversely affected sectors of the economy in the wake of COVID-19 social distancing measures, travel restrictions and prohibition of large gatherings of people. Focusing on Cairns, the Gold Coast, Central West and the Sunshine Coast – four regional areas of Queensland, Australia – this article provides an overview of impacts on cultural tourism and considers the prospects for regional cultural tourism as part of a ‘creative economy’ revival.

The Chinese digital technology giants, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT), dominate over their competitors in China across platforms that include e-commerce, digital entertainment, e-finance and artificial intelligence (AI). To understand BAT’s corporate power and their strategic role working with the government – in this case, their involvement in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – this paper unveils the capabilities of these three oligopolies and discusses their international expansion in relation to the BRI. The BRI is being constructed on two layers, the physical and digital infrastructure, and the BAT are contributing to the latter. This paper examines the interrelations between BAT and the state through case studies, observing the tensions and potential contradictions arising from the reliance of the Chinese state on the BAT to build digital infrastructure, while the BAT seek to minimize direct state regulation for their data-driven business models.

As the news media continue to search for sustainable business models in response to digitisation, concern about low levels of trust in news has been rising. Trust in news brands is seen as an essential pre-requisite for their economic survival. While there is extant research on the crisis of trust in news, less attention has been paid to identifying possible solutions from the perspective of the audience. Based on a survey of 1619 Australian news consumers, this paper helps address this gap. Informed by existing research, participants were asked about a range of possible factors influencing their perceptions of trust in news. Participants expressed strongest support for reducing bias and opinion from journalists in stories, making reporters declare all conflicts of interest, and boosting the amount of in-depth reporting. Increasing journalists’ activity on social media and employing more reporters, were less supported remedies, particularly among those who tend to have low trust in news. Those who have higher trust in news are more supportive of options to boost their trust further, whereas those with low trust innews are less enthusiastic. These findings highlight the challenge for news organisations of improving perceptions of trust among those who are already sceptical about the news.

Digital platforms such as search engines and social media have become major gateways to news. Algorithms are used to deliver news that is consistent with consumers’ preferences and individuals share news through their online social networks. This networked environment has resulted in growing uncertainty about online information which has had an impact on news industries globally. While it is well established that perceptions of trust in news found on social media or via search engines are lower than traditional news media, there has been less discussion about the impact of social media use on perceptions of trust in the news media more broadly. This study fills that gap by examining the influence of social media as news sources and pathways to news on perceptions of the level of news trust at a country level. A secondary data analysis of a 26-country survey in 2016 and 2019 was conducted. The analysis revealed an increase in social media use for accessing news resulted in a decline in trust in news media generally across the globe. Higher levels of general mistrust in news were related to an increased use of sharing of news. This paper argues the use of social media for news is closely linked to the increase in news mistrust, which is likely to continue to rise as the number of people using social media to access news continues to grow.

In the context of a perceived crisis of globalization, this article outlines key features of the globalization paradigm that bore influence in media and communication studies, observing two recurring and related weaknesses: underestimation of the continuing significance of nation-states, and overestimation of the extent to which cultures and identities had become ‘post-national’ and cosmopolitan. The rise of populism could lead to a post-global era, but it is more likely that it marks a reassertion of national policy and political priorities into the operations of global corporations and multilateral institutions. This raises the question of whether global communication studies need to be more concerned with national policy questions rather than with ‘the global’ as an entity in its own right.

One of the paradoxes of the misinformation and ‘fake news’ debates are that they require a greater degree of trust in media, digital platforms and governments in order to combat conspiracy theories, when in fact distrust of media, digital platforms and governments is part of a wider crisis of trust in institutions and expertise. This suggests that we need a more sophisticated analysis of the politics of expertise and how they intersect with both policies towards digital platforms and shifts in the political sphere. Drawing upon the work of Thomas Piketty on shifts in electoral politics, and Pippa Norris on the rise of populism, it is argued that debates about tech policy are largely played out between educated elites from ‘liberal’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ perspectives, which leaves them open to populist critique. One of the reasons why there are greater calls to regulate digital platforms is the rise of political populism, which can leave digital activists in a political bind: they favour measures to rein in the power of ‘Big Tech’ in principle, but are very wary of any measures perceived to increase the power of nation states with regards to the Internet.

There has been a resurgence of interest across multiple jurisdictions in greater regulation by nation-states of aspects of the structure, conduct and performance of digital platforms. This has been driven by: growing concerns about the economic and other forms of power exercised by the largest platform companies in the digital economy; a series of ‘public shocks’ related to the misuse of such power and digital reach; pervasive community concerns about privacy, security, the misuse of personal data, and the erosion of rights in a digital age; and a policy shift from a ‘rights’ discourse that dominated early debates about internet governance towards one focused upon potential risks and online harms. While there are similar factors across nations promoting questions about why greater regulation of digital platforms should occur, there is less consensus about how it should be undertaken. This report seeks to map the issues raised and policies recommended, identifying the issues as arising across the fields of competition policy, content policy and digital rights. Undertaking an initial environmental scan of 65 public enquiries, the authors undertook a textual and thematic analysis of a subset of 20 public inquiries, across seven countries, the European Union, and the United Nations. The approach taken parallels that of Kretschmer, Furgal and Schlesinger in their mapping of the emergence of a new regulatory field of platform governance in the United Kingdom (Kretschmer et al., 2021). In terms of policy recommendations, it was found that with regards to competition, access to data, competition in digital markets, the future of the news industry, and platform regulation were common themes across the enquiries. The main drive for content regulation has been perceived online harms, and the main themes identified include the role of digital platforms, in disseminating or restricting access to harmful content, support for civil society organisations monitoring misinformation and online harms, development of multi-stakeholder codes of practice, and an expanded role of public authorities. In the more diffuse field of rights, the main drivers of policy reform are online targeting of consumers, transparency on political advertising, data portability, privacy laws, and regulations on third-party uses of data along the lines of the European Union’s GDPR. There is also an emerging literature on regulatory issues raised by artificial intelligence. The report concludes with a discussion of issues raised by national policy regulations, including jurisdictional authority over global platforms headquartered in other countries, the question of who regulates, and the appropriate balance between nation-state regulation, industry self-regulation, and multi-stakeholder governance. It finds some support for the proposition that such issues are seeing the rise of hybrid regulatory entities that operate across industry and policy silos, as part of what Philip Schlesinger has termed neo-regulation (Schlesinger, 2021).

This Open Access volume provides an in-depth exploration of global policy and governance issues related to digital platform regulation. With an international ensemble of contributors, the volume has at its heard the question: what would actually be involved in digital platform regulation?’. Once a specialised and niche field within internet and digital media studies, internet governance has in recent years moved to the forefront of policy debate. In the wake of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica and the global ‘techlash’ against digital monopolies, platform studies are undergoing a critical turn, but there is a greater need to connect such analysis to questions of public policy. This volume does just that, through a rich array of chapters concretely exploring the operation and influence of digital platforms and their related policy concerns. A wide variety of digital communication platforms are explored, including social media, content portals, search engines and app stores. An important and timely work, ‘Digital Platform Regulation’ provides valuable insights into new global platform-orientated policy reforms, supplying an important resource to researchers everywhere seeking to engage with policymakers in the debate about the power of digital platforms and how to address it.

Over the past decade the study of internet governance and platform regulation has evolved into a new, socially engaged regulatory field. This chapter introduces regulatory debates surrounding the rise of digital communications platforms and their similarities to media companies. It considers the growth of regulatory activism in response to platformisation and the ‘techlash’, disputes about platform companies’ intermediary liability, and their resistance to legal controls. The chapter also explores the distinction between regulation and governance strategies, emphasising the challenges of self-regulation. It introduces core concerns of the contributors including: how we might address platforms’ dire impact on public interest journalism; how we can develop coherent, transparent, and convergent regulatory frameworks for tackling platform power; how we might analyse and monitor platforms’ new datafied, participatory advertising operations; how we can foster local content and conceive the politics of discoverability in an age of global streaming services; why platforms might have more in common with telecommunications than media companies, and, fundamentally, why governments’ early support for platform self-regulation and governance has shifted in response to political and economic transformations.

Since the 2010s, we witness the rise of populism and nationalism as part of a reaction against the global policies of the last 30 years in Western liberal democracies and beyond. This article seeks to unpack the rise of populism and nationalism and its relationship to social media. We review the relevant literature relating to the globalization paradigm and assess how it has influenced communication studies. The rise of the globalization theory coincides with key advancements in the post-Cold War world, such as the growth of international trade, the global movement of people, the increase in the number of international laws and forums, economic liberalism, as well as the rise of the internet and global digital communication networks. But while the global era denotes a cosmopolitan vision, economic insecurity, growing inequality in wealth distribution, as well as cultural change and shifts in traditional values and norms have brought about a broader concern that globalization is associated with a shift of power to transnational elites, whose impact upon common people’s life and experiences is not fully acknowledged. Contemporary populism has been associated with nationalism, but also with the active use of social media platforms as alternative communication sites to mainstream media which is seen as having been captured by elite consensus politics. This complicates the relationship between truth and free expression in an age of social media, meaning that we need to account for the role of such platforms in the rise of populism and ‘post-truth’ politics, as well as its scope to advance the goals and strategies of progressive social movements.

A striking feature of the 2010s has been significant growth in the number of creative industries courses being offered worldwide, seemingly independently of the fortunes of creative industries as a...

What has been referred to as the crisis of trust in social institutions has deep connections with communications, whether it be declining trust in news media and journalism, debates about the power of digital platforms and trust in online environments, questions surrounding media effects, the rise of political populism, or how trust or mistrust shapes interpersonal and intergroup communication. At the same time, trust in communications research has something of a “hidden history” when compared to disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, political science, and economics. Through a systematic literature review of uses of the concept of trust in six journals published by the International Communication Association—Journal of Communication; Communication Theory; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; Human Communication Research; Communication, Culture & Critique; and Annals of the International Communication Association (formerly Communication Yearbook)—this article undertakes a chronological and thematic analysis of how research into trust has evolved among communication researchers from the 1950s to 2020. It concludes with a discussion of the distinctive contributions of communications as a scholarly field to trust studies more broadly.

This was my ICA Fellows presentation to the 2021 Annual (virtual) Conference. It provides an overview of my academic career and some of the priority areas of my work.

There has been much discussion worldwide about the crisis of trust, with evidence of declining trust in social, economic, political and media institutions. The rise of populism, and the differing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic between nations, has been drawing attention to wider implications of pervasive distrust, including distrust of the media. In this article, I develop three propositions. First, I identify trust studies as a rich interdisciplinary field, linking communication to other branches of the social sciences and humanities. Second, I argue that we lack a comprehensive account of how trust has been understood in communication, and that doing so requires integrating macro-societal approaches with the “meso” level of institutions, and the “micro” level of interpersonal communication. Third, I propose that a focus upon trust would open up new perspectives on two important topics—the future of news media and journalism, and the global rise of populism.

While the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic led to significant growth in news consumption, this did not translate into either greater trust or an improved financial situation for news providers. At a time when disinformation has become a key concern with regards to public health messaging, this mistrust of mainstream news media has potentially disastrous consequences for public communication in a time of urgent public health concerns. The article explores five issues for the study of news and trust, including the impact of digital platforms, the accountability revolution, the crisis of news media business models, the power-shift within media to platforms in the time of COVID-19, and the turn to subscription-based media. The latter raises critical issues around the value of news, and the future relationship between subscriptions, advertising revenue and public funding in the future of news publication and distribution.

This paper understands the evolution of Internet governance as occurring in three phases: (1) the early phase of a largely open Internet and minimal government regulation; (2) growing concern about online harms and other adverse consequences of the platformisation of the Internet; and (3) the current phase, where appropriate models of Internet governance are being widely debated, and nation-states are enacting new laws for digital platforms. It notes that the implications of this shift are yet to filter through to global Internet governance institutions, which continue to be largely framed around multistakeholderism and a minimal role for national governments. The result is the rise of tendencies towards a global ‘Splinternet’ and a democratic deficit around issues of Internet governance.