• Your face belongs to TikTok

    Niels Wouters     |      July 27, 2021

    TikTok is hugely popular but its latest decision to capture unique digital copies of users faces and voices poses a cybersecurity threat to our identities and privacy.

  • Time to cancel cancel culture?

    Dino Sossi     |      July 26, 2021

    Banishing people from public discourse for personal transgressions or political incorrectness can do more harm than good.

  • WhatsApp and the right to encrypt

    Anastasia Kapetas     |      July 20, 2021

    Encrypted messaging has become a very difficult business. Despite their reach, it’s hard to make money from messaging apps and their key service – encryption – is under constant attack from actors across the political spectrum.

  • The insights and idiocy of social media research

    Nicole Cruz     |      July 12, 2021

    The methods used to generate evidence for seemingly significant scientific findings regarding social media can also seem to support nonsensical claims.

  • You are the product

    Mark Andrejevic     |      July 9, 2021

    A recent expose by the investigative journalists at The Markup revealed how Facebook uses detailed information about what people do online – the websites they visit and the search terms they use – to allow pharmaceutical companies to target people regarding medical conditions in which they’ve shown an interest.

  • No news isn’t good news

    Andrew Dodd     |      June 27, 2021

    Thousands of Australian journalists have lost their jobs in recent years as traditional newsrooms cut staff after advertising revenues collapsed in the face of internet competition.

  • May cause side effects

    Diane Nazaroff     |      June 2, 2021

    A UNSW researcher says a positive social media campaign could help to counter misinformation and fears about COVID vaccine side effects and boost vaccination uptake.

  • The case for a ‘disinformation CERN’

    Anastasia Kapetas     |      May 22, 2021

    The scale and reach of the disinformation problem is now so vast that only research cooperation across the democratic world can address the shared threat to our societies.

  • We need herd immunity against vaccine misinformation

    Open Forum     |      May 14, 2021

    A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE revealed over 103 million people globally liked, shared, retweeted or reacted with an emoji to misinformation and conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines.

  • China’s propaganda war pays off

    Julia Bergin     |      May 13, 2021

    Chinese propaganda may be crude in terms of content, but the sheer weight of the Communist Party’s misinformation campaign is shifting the narrative in its favour around the world.

  • People still want country newspapers

    Kristy Hess     |      May 10, 2021

    The majority of country press audiences prefer to read their local paper in print than online. In fact, many said they would stop reading their papers if they went digital only.

  • How the world saw Australia’s ‘black summer’

    Open Forum     |      May 7, 2021

    Australia’s ‘black summer’ of bushfires was depicted on the front pages of the world’s media with images of wildlife and habitat destruction, caused by climate change, while in Australia the toll on ordinary people remained the visual front-page focus.