00:00 We are talking about some pretty toxic kinds of communication that denigrates entire races
00:08 or groups of people based on their identity.
00:12 So these are everything from very much everyday forms of this which might be just put downs
00:18 or other kinds of slurs to hate and indeed even violence or violent commentary.
00:25 How challenging is it though because we've seen recently issues around how social media
00:32 platforms and companies determine what they call community standards when it comes to
00:39 the sorts of discourse that we're seeing on these platforms.
00:42 And of course for some people their idea of what is a standard to be upheld will vary
00:47 so it's a challenging space isn't it?
00:50 Yeah it's challenging but I'd say there's a lot more that the companies can be doing.
00:54 We've seen with the takeover of what was formerly Twitter now X by Elon Musk that he sacked
01:00 a lot of the standards and trust and safety groups on that platform.
01:04 And that's one platform that has turned incredibly toxic now as a result because essentially
01:08 he's kind of given the free reign to those to be on that platform to engage in racist
01:15 baiting commentary and outright racist and hateful abuse towards other members of that
01:20 community and indeed in the broader community.
01:23 And it's not okay, it's not acceptable.
01:25 We have laws in this country that protect people in terms of not being racially vilified.
01:31 We don't see that necessarily reflected on platforms like X and yeah there's much more
01:36 that those platforms could be doing.
01:38 Now when it comes to social media platforms and how they function, where are people coming
01:44 up most of their problems?
01:46 Is it from individuals making targeted attacks or are there other ways that people are encountering
01:52 harmful offensive material?
01:55 So what we have to understand is social media is not something that is there in isolation.
01:59 It's part of a broader media ecosystem and what we certainly see is that social media
02:03 plays just one role.
02:05 The news media have an inflated role to play within this and so a lot of the commentary
02:09 we see is in relation to news and other kinds of material that people have encountered elsewhere
02:15 within the news media landscape.
02:17 So this could be a video that they've encountered from a news channel say parked on YouTube
02:23 that then is taken and is then amplified within a number of other platforms and perhaps used
02:29 as the basis to form particular racist attacks or other things to individuals or groups on
02:35 those other platforms.
02:36 And so we can't just look at social media in isolation.
02:39 We need to look at the role that the broader media landscape and indeed our own politicians,
02:44 celebrities and other influential people within the Australian landscape have to play.
02:49 How well are we actually tracking what's happening as well online and on platforms?
02:56 Do we actually have a real clear understanding of the amount of racism and other forms of
03:02 offensive commentary occurring?
03:05 And is there enough transparency around what companies are doing?
03:10 So for the longest time the centre that I lead, the Digital Media Research Centre at
03:14 QT, has been tracking a lot of this kind of online commentary on the major platforms.
03:19 It's got a lot more difficult and indeed this is the first kind of political campaign that
03:25 we've tracked where we've been locked out of a major platform like Twitter.
03:28 So now with the changes and with Elon Musk's new management of that platform X, we can't
03:33 actually gather data in the same way that we used to.
03:36 And what that means is that the Australian public suffer as a result because we were
03:40 one of the only entities in Australia that was tracking that at a broad scale to kind
03:45 of encounter and find these forms of communication, the racism and other kinds of harmful, untruthful
03:52 information as well, and calling that into account.
03:56 And those changes to the way in which we as independent researchers can access that data
04:00 now means the Australian public are poorer as a result because we can't get that necessary
04:04 transparency.
04:05 So myself and other colleagues in the centre would call on the government to force the
04:10 hand of those companies to be much more upfront and transparent to allow us access to gather
04:15 that data so we can make those informed commentary and analysis of the state of our public conversation.
04:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Comments