Democracy depends on an information environment in which the media provide relevant news and information to citizens who are interested in public issues and willing to become knowledgeable about what is happening in society. In this article, we analyse Australians' narratives about their daily social media use patterns. We first map media-related challenges that face democratic societies. Then we analyse, based on our original qualitative research (focus groups, in-depth interviews, and media diaries of 66 Australians), dominant media patterns and sentiments: the (excessive) time spent on commercial social media; and avoidance and apathy. These, we conclude, have serious consequences for the healthy functioning of a democratic society. The landscape of commercial social media is associated with disengagement, withdrawal, and a reluctance to participate in democratic life.

To suggest that, for those influenced by his work, Graeme modeled the critical conscience of cultural studies is to highlight these key themes in his approach: the relation of theory to meaningful practice, an abiding concern with the power relations that shape everyday life, the intellectual, ethical-moral, and civic role of higher education, and, above all, a contribution to the public good. His contributions are monumental and remain an inspiration to those who share his version of cultural studies and its commitments. There is much work still to do, but we are all better off-and profoundly grateful-for having been fortunate enough to share the place with him for a while.

Inspired by Vincent Mosco’s work, this article argues that ‘agentic’ AI responds to a crisis of control in data-driven processes of commodification and spatialisation. The incorporation of interactive digital technologies into a growing range of economic processes results in cascading logics of automation that lead from automated data collection to automated sense-making to automated content creation and decision-making. These forms of automation reconfigure economic structures, resulting in ‘social recession’: the offloading of social relations onto automated processes that make it harder to recognise irreducible forms of societal interdependence while foregrounding a hyper-trophied individualism. If Mosco’s concept of ‘structuration’ provides an opening for collective participation in re-shaping power relations, social recession threatens forms of mutual recognition upon which this participation relies. The struggle of our time will be for control over the systems that promise to ‘make sense’ and then act upon the data deluge.

Drawing on a collection of online ads for scam bitcoin exchanges, this article situates their appeal and aesthetic within the longer history of populist political marketing. This history connects with current forms of commercial "conspirituality" that thrive on social media platforms, inviting users to suspend their disbelief in miracle cures and get-rich-quick schemes. The scam ads we examined mobilize critiques of existing social and economic inequality to enhance the appeal of the false solutions they offer. Following recent work on conspirituality, the article draws upon Jacques Ranciere's notion of "dissensus" to analyze the ways in which the style and content of scam ads invite a form of "conspiracy believing" that challenges common sense understandings. It then turns to Alenka Zupan & ccaron;i & ccaron;'s critical psychoanalytic theory to argue that these beliefs, far from critiquing contemporary capitalism, work to disavow its pathologies.

The article discusses the results of an empirical study that indicated commercial and social media use correlates with lower civic values and lower support for citizenship education fundamental to democratic citizenship. The research is based on original quantitative and qualitative research, conducted in 2024, that included 10 focus groups of 65 participants, and surveyed 2046 Australians, on their media habits, and civic attitudes. Our data revealed that those who use non-commercial media, such as public broadcasting (as opposed to commercial and social media) as their primary source of information are more likely to support teaching citizenship education in schools (41% to 32%) and are more committed to civic values. We argue for further commitment to citizenship education that would include the development of abilities to critically navigate news, as the main commercial platforms are structured in ways that are directly antithetical to civic values: they promote hyper-individualism and self-branding, engagement is privileged over accuracy; and the format is too short and fast for meaningful, civic deliberation.

The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Meta and Alphabet, two of the dominant players in this ecosystem, have contributed significantly to industry disintermediation via the design and market dominance of their advertising systems, which in turn are symbiotic with their own business models, and feed on large amounts of consumer data generated by everyday platform use. The operations and impacts of these systems remain opaque and difficult to observe. Responding to this challenge, we present a methodological framework integrating cultural, legal, media, and computational perspectives to enable the observation of computational advertising. This methodology comprises three novel computational methods: direct data gathering from ad transparency libraries; automated data donation via participatory citizen science browser plug-ins; and a privacy-aware mobile screen capture app. We describe how our suite of computational approaches enables scalable and participant-situated research, overcoming limitations posed by restricted platform access to computational advertising data. Ethical considerations and practical implications are discussed alongside case study findings, further demonstrating the potential for these methods to inform regulatory debates and scholarly advancements in the field.

This afterword situates the phenomenon of "bossware" within the current tendency of automation to facilitate processes of "social recession." This latter term refers to the ways in which recent developments in media technology facilitate tracking and monitoring at a distance. Remote work and the gig economy demonstrate how these technologies promise to reconfigure the firm in ways that reinforce broader logics of casualization and subcontracting that characterize "flexible" accumulation. Managing large-scale, flexible, distanced employment requires automated forms of recognition that now stand in for faceto-face relationships in the workplace. As in the case of the consumer-facing side of the online economy, social recession does not eliminate sociality but runs it through platforms that automatically collect and process interaction data. The result is what this article describes as the "devolution" of recognition-increasingly associated with automated forms of biometric identification and tracking.

Misinformation about climate change poses a substantial threat to societal well-being, prompting the urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. However, the rapid proliferation of online misinformation on social media platforms outpaces the ability of fact-checkers to debunk false claims. Automated detection of climate change misinformation offers a promising solution. In this study, we address this gap by developing a two-step hierarchical model. The Augmented Computer Assisted Recognition of Denial and Skepticism (CARDS) model is specifically designed for categorising climate claims on Twitter. Furthermore, we apply the Augmented CARDS model to five million climate-themed tweets over a six-month period in 2022. We find that over half of contrarian climate claims on Twitter involve attacks on climate actors. Spikes in climate contrarianism coincide with one of four stimuli: political events, natural events, contrarian influencers, or convinced influencers. Implications for automated responses to climate misinformation are discussed. An analysis of five million climate-themed social-media posts identified four distinct spikes in climate change misinformation, using a two-step hierarchical model in machine learning.

Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and its audience-building tools are sold to and used by advertisers. Second, the feature is focused narrowly on single ads and individual users, doing nothing to generate understanding of the patterns and sequences of targeted advertising in relation to other users or over time. We propose both platform practices and independent research strategies that could help to fill this gap between individual explanations, population-level patterns of targeted online advertising and the societal issues associated with it.

Recent developments in AI promise to further enact the shift from personalization to personification in automated digital interfaces. We have already seen the rise of virtual influencers and, more recently, of chatbots that adopt the personas of celebrities. Drawing on the intertwined history of the relationship between parasociality and personal influence, we frame the shift toward personification as a strategy for re-centralizing control over the online media environment. The shift is likely to extend beyond the realm of social media influencers to characterize our interactions with a range of services, platforms, and media content, from search engines to online news and entertainment. Automated personification anticipates a world permeated by enhanced parasocial relations with media devices and interfaces. To the extent that the interactive infrastructures shaping these relations remain controlled by commercial tech platforms, we can anticipate their imperatives will be baked into this version of automated sociality.

This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and advertising of these gambling services in Australia, and in apparent contravention of company policies that require gambling advertisers to follow applicable law. We outline the harms of normalizing gambling on digital media and argue that the limited accountability of digital platforms for online advertising can contribute to these harms. We suggest ways in which the law and its enforcement and platform responsibility can be reformed to prevent harmful gambling advertising.