Changing Media Ecologies in Thailand: Women's Online Participation in the 2013/2014 Bangkok Protests

Traditionally marginalized groups now have more access to new and unconventional means to participate in politics, transforming the media ecologies of existing political environments. Contemporary feminist scholarship has centered on how women use new media technologies to serve political agendas. However, this literature focuses predominately on women in the West, while women in developing countries, or Asia more generally, have been largely excluded from analysis. This article aims to fill in this gap by examining Thai women’s online activities during the 2013/2014 Bangkok political protests. Specifically, we ask how the rise of social and digital media has altered what it means to participate politically in the context of Thai women’s present-day political experience. To answer this question we looked at how women resorted to various digital and social media to discuss women’s rights and political issues, including Yingluck Shinawatra’s political leadership as Thailand’s first female prime minister (2011-2014). Moving beyond traditional notions of participation, we argue that there is a need to recognize the emerging dynamics of women’s online engagement in the political landscape of Thailand. In the context of a totalitarian state, speaking out against the ruling authority online embodies an additional layer of citizen resistance, a feature of digital life that is often taken for granted in Western democracies

The politics of data visualisation and policy making

Data visualisation has become ubiquitous in everyday life, from seeing images in news media to tracking individual health indicators. While the effects of data visualisation on society and people have been explored within a range of literature, there has been far less attention paid to the interconnectedness of data visualisation and policy making. In this special issue, we explore how data visualisation matters for policy priorities, processes and outcomes; how it reflects the demands and constraints posed by specific policy problems; and finally, what data visualisations reveal about broader political, social, and cultural shifts and the implications for policy

Young Australians navigating the ‘Careers Information Ecology’

The policy orientations of advanced neoliberal democracies situate young people as rational actors who are responsible for their own career outcomes. While career scholars have been critical of how this routinely ignores the unequal effects of structural constraints on personal agency, they have long suggested that young people should have access to the best available ‘roadmaps’ and advice to navigate the uncertainties baked into the contemporary economic landscape. Complementing the significant attention that is given to the (potentially emancipatory) experience of formal careers guidance, we present findings from a multi-method study. We explore young Australians’ (aged 15–24) navigation of careers information through a nationally representative survey (n = 1103), focus groups with 90 participants and an analysis of 15,227 social media comments. We suggest that the variety of formal and informal sources pursued and accessed by young people forms a relational ‘ecology’. This relationality is twofold. First, information is often sequential, and engagements with one source can inform the experience or pursuit of another. Second, navigation of the ecology is marked by a high level of intersubjectivity through interpersonal support networks including peers, family and formal service provision. These insights trouble a widespread, but perhaps simplistic, reading of young people having largely internalised a neoliberal sensibility of ‘entrepreneurial selfhood’ in their active pursuit of a range of career advice. Throughout our analysis, we attend to the ways that engagement in the career information ecology is shaped by social inequalities, further underscoring challenges facing careers guidance and social justice goals

#METOO AND INTERSECTIONALISM: "RADICAL COMMUNITY HEALING" OR "VOYEURISTIC TRAUMA PORN?"

In October 2017, millions of people reflected on their experiences of sexual abuse and harassment, publicly sharing their testimonials in an expression of global vulnerability using the hashtag #MeToo. Many of the tweets portrayed the angst and distress individuals experienced in their decision to participate, indicating the psychological costs of engaging with #MeToo. Further, some tweets expressed frustration at the re-appropriated nature of the campaign and the collective feeling of an “intersectional betrayal” by white women and feminists who dominated the mainstream media reporting of the movement. This research foregrounds the intersectional concerns that result from the scale and reach of the millions of testimonials suspended online that constitute the #MeToo movement. It highlights how the many stories that have circulated the online sphere obscure the absence and recognition of marginalised women and those who are already more vulnerable in regards to experiencing sexual assault. The paper adopts an intersectional framework, as conceptualised by Crenshaw (1991), to further an understanding of how race, class, and gender collide and how subordination can be reproduced within feminist protests. Drawing on a large data set of tweets, this research combines content, discourse and social network analysis to examine the narratives related to participation. The paper highlights the experiences and reflections of users who self-identified as queer, disabled, or a person of colour within their tweets. A social network analysis is also used to visualise a snapshot of the affective publics that arose at the beginning and to illustrate how systems of oppression converge

Welcome to the coven: organising feminist activism in the connective era

© 2019 Dr. Verity Anne TrottThe highly publicised protest wave of the early 2010s triggered a reconceptualization of the organisational practices and structures of contemporary activism. Prior research was focused on analysing the new sociality of the internet, primarily organisational websites and forums, and how this was affecting, influencing, and extending collective action (Bimber et al., 2005; Chadwick, 2007; Earl, 2010). The traditional model of collective action was found to no longer account for the full range of actions that were occurring in digitised spaces. In response to this shift, Bennett and Segerberg (2012, 2013) proposed the logic of connective action to account for new models of protest organising with social and digital technologies. However, their large-scale networked analysis, while insightful, fails to capture the finer-grained relationships between activists particularly within less transparent networks. In addition, since the development of their theory, there has been an explosion of feminist protests epitomised by the recent #MeToo movement. The scale, reach, and seeming permanence of these feminist actions demands further examination. Thus, this thesis provides a theoretical account of the organisational structures and practices occurring behind the scenes of contemporary feminist actions. Drawing on a social media ethnographic approach, this thesis documents the post-digital and hybrid feminist social movement repertoire that is resulting in a globalisation of feminist protests. The research is based on in-depth interviews with feminist activists and focuses on three case studies of feminist protests: the original Hollaback! campaign hosted on a photoblog, the series of #TakeDownJulienBlanc post-digital protests, and the solidarity feminist hashtag #EndViolenceAgainstWomen. The thesis also incorporates a discussion of the #MeToo movement due to its significance in the contemporary political climate. Its key contributions are challenging the myth of structurelessness within contemporary protests; reaffirming the hybridity of organisational practices; and conceptualising the franchising of feminist activism. Overall, the thesis identifies the profoundly feminist issues that impact contemporary organisational structures and practices, resulting in an expansion and partial contestation of Bennett and Segerberg’s (2013) connective action typology

Black "Rantings": Indigenous feminist writers' online narratives in a postfeminist age.

This paper draws on Rosalind Gill's (2007) conceptualisation of the postfeminist sensibility to shape an analysis of how indigenous feminist writers are challenging postfeminist narratives and developing their own counter narratives. A postfeminist sensibility, along with the post-identity ideology that is currently prevalent in Western society, is built upon the narrative that inequalities surrounding gender and race have been conquered and are firmly rooted in the past. To further an understanding of how Indigenous Australian feminist writers are challenging key aspects of postfeminism, this paper examines the ways in which they use the microblogging site Twitter to develop a first-hand and direct engagement with the writers' personal views and to shed insight into how they are challenging postfeminist narratives on an everyday level. With the proliferation of intersectional hashtags created by women of colour, Twitter has been identified as an important tool in the effort to develop "a sustained critique of white feminism" (Daniels, 2016:27; Loza, 2014). While social media sites have been praised for providing alternative and liberating spaces for marginalised feminist voices (Boler & Nitsou, 2014; Halavais & Garrido, 2014; Radsch & Khamis, 2013; Shaw, 2012), there remains a racial disparity between the voices that are elevated online (Nakamura, 2002). This paper asks, how are Indigenous Australian feminist writers challenging aspects of postfeminism online and what are the prevailing counter narratives about women, indigeneity, and feminism

“It ain’t a compliment”:Feminist data visualisation and digital street harassment advocacy

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level

TUNING OUT HATE SPEECH ON REDDIT: AUTOMATING MODERATION AND DETECTING TOXICITY IN THE MANOSPHERE

Over the past two years social media platforms have been struggling to moderate at scale. At the same time, they have come under fire for failing to mitigate the risks of perceived ‘toxic’ content or behaviour on their platforms. In effort to better cope with content moderation, to combat hate speech, ‘dangerous organisations’ and other bad actors present on platforms, discussion has turned to the role that automated machine-learning (ML) tools might play. This paper contributes to thinking about the role and suitability of ML for content moderation on community platforms such as Reddit and Facebook. In particular, it looks at how ML tools operate (or fail to operate) effectively at the intersection between online sentiment within communities and social and platform expectations of acceptable discourse. Through an examination of the r/MGTOW subreddit we problematise current understandings of the notion of ‘tox¬icity’ as applied to cultural or social sub-communities online and explain how this interacts with Google’s Perspective tool

Ad Accountability Online: A methodological approach

Recent attention paid to 'dark patterns' in online marketing has yet to engage with the most prevalent forms of ad targeting online. The dominant model we have chosen for supporting the online information environment is based on data-driven targeted advertising. These targeted ads are 'dark' in the sense that they are visible only to those to whom they are directed, which poses challenges for public accountability. Their sheer quantity is matched by their ephemerality. They are also 'dark' in the sense that the overall pattern of their delivery is invisible. Not only can we not see the ads directed to others, but we cannot see who else is being targeted the way we are. These 'dark patterns' raise three sets of social concerns about discrimination and socially detrimental forms of messaging. First, dark patterns of advertising can reproduce historical forms of discrimination against protected groups. Second, they may enable the circulation of forms of stereotyping that fly under the radar of public accountability. Third, they enable new forms of granular discrimination that, even if legal, exacerbate social division and injustice. For example, in the United States, dark ads have been used to target and suppress the voter turnout in African-American communities in swing states. Dark ad patterns have also been used to target job ads to particular age groups in violation of US anti-discrimination law. In this case, the individual ads are not the problem – rather the detrimental consequences are a result of their overall pattern of their distribution. With these social concerns in mind, this article reports on experiments designed to submit targeted advertising to public scrutiny.</p