18 Social media

Tama Leaver

Introduction
Australians are all over social media. At the outset of 2023, over 21 million Australians regularly
use social media, comprising more than 80 per cent of the country’s population. There are more
than 32 million active mobile phones in the country, which means that there are more phones
than people (the population of Australia is just over 26 million people), and those people are
frequently engaging with social media across a variety of apps. The average Australian spends
more than two hours a day on social media platforms, with these platforms not only allowing
self-expression and social connectivity but also being sources of entertainment, information and
news. Unsurprisingly, social media is inescapably intertwined with the social, political, eco­
nomic and educational realms for most Australians whether they are heavy users or not. Younger
Australians are spending more time on short video platforms than any other service, with the
Chinese-owned TikTok commanding more than 29 hours a month attention for the average Aus­
tralian user, which is the most engagement time of any single platform (O’Donnell 2023). The
icons of most social media platforms are immediately recognisable to most Australians, yet few
platforms are based in Australia, and none are owned by Australians. Indeed, in considering the
role of social media in Australia, the question of whether there is a specific ‘Australian social
media’ or not is one well worth considering.

Web 2.0: social media optimism

The moment that Time named ‘You’ the person of the year in 2006 – referring to everyday
users who were filling the web with user-generated content from YouTube videos to Wikipedia
entries – is widely cited as the peak of what has been referred to as Web 2.0. Yet from the outset,
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it should be noted that Web 2.0 does not clearly demarcate a specific time, or even a break with
some imaginary Web 1.0; rather, it is a convenient shorthand invented by digital marketers and
technologists to allow them to spruik the newness of particular online tools and platforms (Allen
2013). Despite being less catchy, the Web 2.0 era might better be understood through the lens
of what Jenkins (2006) referred to as a ‘participatory culture’, where audiences create as much
as consume, or what Bruns (2008) theorised as ‘produsage’, where the roles of producer and
user have collided. During this time, blogging entered the mainstream, podcasts first emerged,
and platforms including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr all debuted. While
their focus was different, the big commonality was the ability to let users create and share their
own content, as so succinctly captured in Time’s ‘You’. Yet are all of these platforms really
social media? Following Burgess and Green (2018), the question of whether YouTube is a social
media platform or not, for example, is, of course, not an absolute question, or just a question of

DOI: 10.4324/9781003280644-20

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 232 Tama Leaver
a platform’s affordances, but a contextual one; YouTube has the technical features of a social
media platform, so if specific audiences are using those features to build communities and
interact, it’s a social media platform for them. For others, it may (just) be a source of music
videos, movie trailers and amusing shorts featuring influencers or cute cats. More than anything,
though, the Web 2.0 era was one characterised by optimism about the potential of communica­
tion and connection online across these new platforms.
This optimism in the Australian social media sphere is eloquently captured in Highfield’s
(2016) analysis of Australian social media use, especially Twitter, as part of state and national
elections. He notes that social media posts tended to run the full gamut from playful to emo­
tional and reactive. Crowdsourced projects such as Democracy Sausage – which saw real-time
Google maps produced aggregating tweets using the #democracysausage and #democracycake
hashtags, featuring reviews of the types of sausages, cakes and vegetarian fare available at dif­
ferent polling booths – are a decidedly Australian artefact driven by irreverence for a compul­
sory voting system:

Buying a sausage in a bun or a cake as a ‘reward’ for completing an individual’s demo­

cratic duty has been a long-established part of Australian elections; social media, espe­
cially through hashtags and projects like Democracy Sausage, amplify these rituals,
highlighting how they are shared experiences that connect voters around the country.
(Highfield 2016, p. 146)

Yet the same social media platforms quickly shift to second screens, allowing Tweets and
other platform posts to hybridise with group television viewing as the results roll in, and then
comments become emotive and reactive as inevitably one of two parties declares victory. Here,
social media as both the personal and the political is evident as well as is the integration of social
media within the rhythms of everyday life.
Social media has also proven to be a useful and important part of the way Australians have
dealt with natural emergencies, especially when those emergencies touch on metropolitan
regions. Important work by Bruns, Burgess, Crawford and Shaw (2012), for example, outlined
the significant role that social media played in both sharing information about the 2011 South
East Queensland floods and coordinating ad hoc and official responses in terms of relief efforts.
This research showed that platforms like Twitter played a huge role in the way information was
communicated and shared, but it was even more vital that official voices, including emergency
services, were also engaging on these platforms to amplify vital information while addressing
and disproving instances of disinformation that were also being shared. For crisis communica­
tion in Australia, this research showed how valuable well-managed social media could be.
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The visual turn

In late 2010 Instagram and a raft of other photo-sharing apps and platforms were launched,
marking a visual turn, where not only did visual images come to be more and more prevalent
on social media but also that smartphones were at a point where their cameras were able to
take photos of a quality worth sharing. Before this time, it’s worth remembering that many
platforms that are deeply visual today relied on third parties to host even basic images. Twitter
was launched in 2006, for example, but it took four years until it hosted pictures itself; until
then third-party platforms such as Twitpic were needed to show an image in a Twitter feed. In
that context, Instagram’s very straight-forward square framed images and filters, which could
add a semblance of quality to even the most banal image, saw it and similar visual social media

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 Social media 233
platforms reach huge user numbers rapidly. While Facebook was one of the earliest platforms
to support image hosting, Mark Zuckerberg saw the rise of Instagram as the first great threat to
Facebook’s newfound dominance, which led to Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $US1 bil­
lion in 2012, despite Instagram having no way of making profit or a clear business model at that
time (Leaver et al. 2020).
When the Instagram app was released, photographs in square frames became an aesthetic
norm. However, the visual form that has been most persistently linked to the platform over time
is the selfie. Selfies, or self-portrait photos, were a lightning rod for moral panic media pieces
about the decline of almost anything; from selfies and school to selfies at funerals, selfies were
deployed as signifiers that social media was destroying society. And yet far from frivolous, self­
ies have become more and more part of social media, including the way that social media users
communicate with each other in various forms (Tiidenberg 2018). Many selfies, or course, tech­
nically aren’t selfies in so far as they are not self-portraits but rather images of one person, or a
small group, often taken once again by someone not visible in the frame. Selfies, like all social
media, have evolved as forms of communication, forms of connection and forms of intimacy at
various scales. Selfies with celebrities, politicians, entertainers and others are a form of social
media currency. This is exemplified and ritualised in that no celebrity with any meaningful
social media presence can visit Western Australia without visiting Rottnest Island to capture a
selfie with a quokka.
Selfies are also associated with the group of entrepreneurial social media users who quickly
learned that the visual economy of selfies could translate into very real clout and commercial
opportunities online: influencers. While influencers were initially dismissed and diminished,
Abidin (2016a) describes the practices of ‘subversive frivolity’ whereby often very social media
and business savvy influencers created very successful businesses that were either not easily vis­
ible in the mainstream or underestimated as inconsequential. Instead, influencers have emerged
as the power users and most successful professionals of the visual social media landscape, with
followers in the thousands and millions. Of course, as with most creative industries, for many
influencers their sustained and substantial ‘visibility labour’ does not result in the successes they
aspire to, but there are, nevertheless, influencers who are successful across Australia and across
every visual social media platform (Abidin 2016b).
Visual social media is a lot more than photographs, or even photos and videos. Social media
platforms are replete with visual options, with memes carrying humour online and animated
GIFs providing a concise shorthand for reactions and emotions while the lexicon of emojis
continues to expand year on year (Highfield and Leaver 2016). One of the most important
visual formats is Stories, where images and very short videos are posted and then disappear
after 24 hours. Originally created by Snapchat, but most successfully popularised by Instagram,
Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Stories saw the more conversational visual forms re-emerge at a time when the main feeds on
big social media platforms were getting more and more polished and, thus, less and less acces­
sible for vernacular sharing.
The mainstreaming of visual social media brought more Australians to social media than ever
before, but it also brought or amplified more problems, including problems long entrenched
in Australian society, including systematic racism. In 2015 well-known Indigenous footballer
Adam Goodes was systematically ‘booed’ at AFL games while being targeted with racist hate
online that was particularly persistent on visual social media, including the frequent circulation
of images that showed Goodes as an ape. The racism directed at Goodes online also showed the
problems of online content moderation at scale on big social media platforms. While obviously
racist in context, moderators on various platforms failed to remove or block this content when
reported as it did not obviously seem to violate platform policies for moderators not trained

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 234 Tama Leaver
in the Australian context, leading to what Matamoros-Fernández (2017) diagnoses as a ‘plat­
formed racism’.
While filters and other ways to manipulate selfies and self-images can be problematic on
one level, the collision of visual social media and algorithmic manipulation in the form of
‘deepfakes’ represent another problem of a different scale altogether. Deepfakes are, essentially,
artificially created videos where the likeness of one person is inserted onto another (Meikle
2022). There have been very prominent political uses, including a deepfake of Ukrainian Presi­
dent Volodymyr Zelenskyy purportedly telling Ukrainian soldiers to surrender early in the 2022
Russian invasion (Allyn 2022). However, the most persistent and widespread use of deepfake
technology has been the creation and circulation of non-consensual intimate imagery, either
in the form of celebrities being deepfaked to appear in pornographic situations or of individu­
als, almost always women, being placed in deepfakes as a form of misogyny and abuse. While
increasingly recognised as an illegal form of abuse and harassment, the widespread circulation
of sexual deepfakes exposes some of the worst aspects of social media platforms and content
circulation.

Pandemic shifts
The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic differed significantly across the world, and this was
also true within Australia as states and territories responded differently in terms of lockdowns,
border closures, check-in apps, mandated use of masks and so forth. The city of Melbourne
experienced one of the longest periods of physical lockdown of any city in the world, while the
state of Western Australia effectively shut itself off from the rest of the country in terms of travel
for more than a year. The one constant was that most people inside Australia did not travel inter­
nationally for extended periods of time, often being physically cut off from family, friends and
colleagues across the globe. In the context of border closures and lockdowns, communication
across social media became critically important to maintain social ties.
Indeed, the ubiquity of Zoom calls from business and boardrooms to entertainment and edu­
cation was a hallmark of the first years of the 21st century’s first global pandemic. In the absence
of live venues and cinemas, streaming online media became central. In Australia, grassroots
organisation also led to Isol-AID, for example, which saw Australian musicians self-organise
streaming music festivals initially over Instagram and later, as the pandemic continued, via
bespoke community-generated websites (Willcox et al. 2021).
While online communication offered opportunities for many to continue some form of
continued communication, interaction and activity, it also greatly increased and exacerbated
existing inequalities and divides. For example, a white-collar manager might have been able
Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

to transition relatively swiftly to a Zoom call in order to conduct business from a home office;
however, retail workers, or those with large families in small accommodations and less consist­
ent access to devices or reliable high-speed internet, experienced very different pandemics with
far less capacity to simply move online (Hargittai 2022).
The shift to much greater uses of telehealth to avoid the risks of physical proximity was
enabled by various forms of digital and social connectivity but was not experienced equally. For
many people with existing conditions, including anxiety and mental health illnesses, COVID-19
not only took a deep toll, but the shift to telehealth, and decline in other forms of face-to-face
contact and support, often amplified existing illnesses (Lupton and Lewis 2022). Indigenous
Australians have, on average, a lower life expectancy that other Australians, and the pandemic
exacerbated this gap, often meaning remote communities ended up being purposefully cut off
and locked down on health grounds, without a corresponding scale in efforts to address health

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 Social media 235
issues or combat online and offline circulation of health misinformation (Power et al. 2020).
Similarly, for the elderly and people with disabilities, not only was the experience of the pan­
demic more intense, but the rhetoric of ‘returning to normal’ in late 2022 saw many online
options disappearing, despite the virus still being prevalent throughout Australia.
Social media was equally a fervent space for politics during the pandemic, with livestreams
of federal and state politicians sharing pandemic news and lockdown announcements a central
feature of many digital platforms. While no Australian politician has been quite as social media
dependent as Donald Trump, most Australians in politics have multiple social media channels,
with some using them with considerable skill. However, online communication skills do not
always correlate with a capacity to share credible health information, something Trump’s presi­
dency made quite clear. In one of Trump’s most notorious speeches, for example, he suggested
that injecting bleach might actually be a way of combatting COVID-19. Some Australian poli­
ticians were no strangers to health misinformation, either. For instance, after temporary bans
earlier in the year, in April 2021, right-wing federal independent Member of Parliament Craig
Kelly had his Facebook page deleted for repeatedly posting demonstrably false information
about COVID-19 and vaccinations (Taylor and Karp 2021). Social media was also a fervent
ground for the growth and amplification of health and vaccination misinformation, xenophobia
and hate in Australia, as it was globally (Matamoros-Fernández et al. 2022; Pickles et al. 2021).
The increase in time spent online during lockdowns also saw an increase in the attention paid
to influencers, with Australian influencers situated on both sides of the ‘infodemic’, with some
sharing misinformation with their audiences while others amplified health advisories and best
practices in battling the COVID-19, including vaccination (Abidin et al. 2021).

Platformisation and regulation

In 2018, Facebook was rocked by scandal when it was revealed the company had knowingly
allowed a third-party company, Cambridge Analytica, to exploit Facebook to extract the per­
sonal details and information of millions of users and that this data was, in turn, used for deep
political profiling. This profiling then allowed, for example, targeted advertising to be custom­
ised and presented to very small groups of people, attempting to sway their votes. Some 300,000
Australians were amongst the Facebook users to have their data exploited by Cambridge Ana­
lytica (Knaus 2022). While it was overly sensational to infer this breach completely changed
the way some people voted in specific elections, it was, nevertheless, a lightning rod moment
in which many ordinary social media users became aware that their personal data stored and
shared on Facebook was of real value. For many social media users, getting the platforms for
free meant they had few questions about how their personal data was used, but, after 2018, for
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many people, that changed (Bucher 2021). This was also a period when the enormous profits of
social and digital media companies continued to grow, at odds with declining revenues for news
organisations and other creative industries.
From 2017 the relationship between platforms and politicians was increasingly strained, led
by the United States where Donald Trump’s presidency became intertwined with his platform of
choice: Twitter. Throughout his presidency, when Trump’s social media posts were not carried
by any platform, he launched partisan attacks accusing them of left-leaning bias which became
increasingly problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns as Trump Tweeted
factually incorrect information and advice, crossing lines that would have seen less prominent
citizens banned from their accounts. Indeed, it was not until the final days of Trump’s presi­
dency that he crossed a line in promoting civil unrest following his failed re-election campaign
that Twitter finally banned Trump’s account, announcing they had ‘permanently suspended the

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 236 Tama Leaver
account due to the risk of further incitement of violence’, citing its policy against the ‘Glorifica­
tion of Violence’ (Twitter Inc 2021). However, when Elon Musk purchased the platform in 2022
he reversed the ban, allowing Trump to return.
In Australia, the power of the big digital and social media platforms was most directly chal­
lenged by the Australian government and the Australian Competition and Consumer Com­
mission (ACCC) in the form of the Digital Platforms Inquiry, which recommended a raft of
restrictions, governance practices, reforms and other changes to the way social media platforms
operate in Australia (ACCC 2019). Amongst the most notable was the call for a code or legisla­
tion which would force Facebook, Google and others to pay for linking to news content on their
platforms. After negotiations to craft a code broke down, the ACCC tabled a draft Australian
News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) to the dismay of the big platforms who claimed this
would destroy their business model and make them unable to operate in Australia. Google and
Facebook fought the loudest campaigns, with both arguing the NMBC would mean they could
no longer provide search or social media in Australia.
While Google managed to find common ground before the NMBC became law, for just over
a week, Facebook pulled all news content from its platform in Australia, with no news items,
Facebook pages or other content visible to Australian users. This effectively also wiped emer­
gency services information and COVID-19 material at a time when the pandemic and bushfires
were occurring nationwide. While emergency negotiations eventually meant the NMBC was
watered down enough that Facebook could live with it and they returned news to their platform,
the ease with which Australians were used as pawns for negotiation revealed just what value
Australians had to Facebook. Indeed, Facebook and Google’s threats (and Facebook following
through) to cut Australians off from their respective digital platforms strongly resonated with
the idea that these companies see the country very much in colonial terms (Couldry and Mejias
2019), with the colonies needing to be brought to heel occasionally. While the NMBC has since
become law, the concessions Google and Facebook earned meant that both companies reached
some voluntary agreements with news companies, and neither was immediately ‘designated’ or
impacted by the new legislation (Leaver 2021).
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Figure 18.1 Facebook notification that appeared when Australians attempted to share news articles on the
platform in 2021.
Source: Screen capture by author, 20 February 2021.

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 Social media 237
While it might be tempting to see the battle of the NMBC as an outlier, it is notable
that Australia was one of the countries in which Instagram experimented with removing like
counts on their platform (Australian Associated Press 2019), an experiment not undertaken in
the United States, while TikTok experimented in Australia in early 2023 by removing music
tracks from the videos of many Australian TikTokers as part of a negotiation tactic with
music rightsholders (Boseley 2023). From the perspective of the big social media platforms,
it would appear that Australia serves as a convenient market in which to test features and to
see what impact removing or restrict options might have, without upsetting their primary U.S.
or U.K. markets.

The metaverse and generative AI

In a move that surprised many, in late 2021 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg bet
the entire future of his company on his idea of the metaverse when he renamed and rebranded
the Facebook corporate entity Meta. In doing so, he repositioned Facebook, Messenger, Ins­
tagram and WhatsApp as part of the ‘Meta family’ of apps. Perhaps less surprisingly after
its 2014 purchase of virtual reality headset creators Oculus, Meta clearly aspired to build the
persistent, immersive virtual reality (VR) world in which social media users globally will
experience, literally, everything in the spectrum from work to play (presumably experienced
using one of Meta’s Oculus VR headsets). In many ways, Zuckerberg’s metaverse extends
the logic already underpinning the big social media and digital platforms: a corporate dream
of persistent user presence, total surveillance, continuous data extraction and inescapable
monetisation via ubiquitous advertising, all controlled by one company and experienced via
its one brand of proprietary VR headsets. While Zuckerberg’s dream of a metaverse made
a lot of sense in the midst of a global pandemic when most people were forced to work and
socialise online anyway, that vision looks less and less appealing as the rhetoric (if not nec­
essarily the reality) of a post-pandemic ‘back to normal’ world is embraced by many. Meta’s
metaverse may well be further away than Zuckerberg imagined, with early responses to the
first versions and visions of the digital world leaving most users decidedly underwhelmed
(Bell 2022).
While in development for years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) was suddenly the
cause célèbre of early 2023 when both a raft of image-generating AI tools and a public release
of OpenAI’s generative pre-trained transformer (GPT3.5) called ChatGPT made headlines
across Australia and across the globe. Pundits declared that generative AI would revolutionise
everything from education to the information landscape at large. The biggest achievement of
ChatGPT is the ability to write seemingly human-like responses to basic questions and then
Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

refine these responses conversationally. For many users, ChatGPT is social media, but rather
than talking to other humans via a digital interface, with ChatGPT the other user is an AI. Citing
concerns about students cheating, many state education departments across Australia banned
the use of ChatGPT in primary and secondary schools (Leaver 2023). And as an indicator of
the hype around generative AI, Google’s stock price fell hundreds of billions of dollars after it
announced its own generative AI, called Bard. When Bard made a factual error in Google’s ini­
tial promotional material, the error was seized upon by the media (Milmo 2023). Yet generative
AI is still relatively immature, with many responses either deliberately or accidentally including
obvious errors. The politics of how these algorithms are ‘trained’ (i.e. what data they analyse in
learning to respond to questions) leave many questions around value, copyright and ownership
unanswered (Baio 2022).

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 238 Tama Leaver

Box 18.1 ChatGTP defines ‘social media’

While this chapter has deliberately avoided giving a single definition of the term social
media, generative AI tools have no such compunctions. In mid-February 2023 I asked
ChatGPT to respond to the prompt ‘define social media’, and this was the response:

Social media refers to online platforms and tools that enable people to share or
exchange information, ideas, opinions, and other content such as images and videos.
These platforms are designed to facilitate social interaction and foster communities,
often based around shared interests, values, or goals. Examples of social media
include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and TikTok, among oth­
ers. Social media can be used for a variety of purposes, including personal commu­
nication, news dissemination, marketing and advertising, and entertainment.

ChatGPT’s definition is not, strictly speaking, wrong but it is banal, basic and dull. It
certainly fails to capture the breadth of what social media use entails.

Conclusion
Social media is inextricably intertwined in the social, entertainment and information landscapes
and experiences of most Australians. Answering the question of whether there is a specifically
Australian experience of social media depends more on understanding the experiences of indi­
viduals, groups and communities of Australians and how these tools and platforms are integrated
as part of their cultural and social lives. National political attempts to frame and regulate these
platforms are significant, but they’re also something many Australians only notice at moments
of crisis, such as when Facebook blocked all news in 2021. In retrospect the most prophetic
line in the Time piece announcing ‘You’ as person of the year was the keen observation that
the era of Web 2.0 ‘harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom’ (Grossman 2006).
Social media is always already infused with the social problems and social opportunities of the
larger cultures in which the people and communities using these tools are situated. If the local,
national and global challenges of misinformation, misogyny and online hate are confronted and
addressed, then social media may be a space where Australians will continue to want to spend
their time connecting and communicating.
Copyright © 2023. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Further reading
Many Australian authors have produced quintessential platform-specific examinations of social
media including Burgess and Baym’s (2020) Twitter: A Biography; Burgess and Green’s (2018)
YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture; Leaver, Highfield and Abidin’s (2020) Insta­
gram: Visual Social Media Cultures; and Kaye, Zeng and Wikström’s (2022) TikTok: Creativity
in Short Video. Highfield’s (2016) Social Media and Everyday Politics offers a compelling over­
view of social media, while Flew’s (2021) Regulating Platforms interrogates whether national
regulation can actually work. To situate the social media experiences and representation of
Indigenous Australians, see Carlson and Frazer’s (2021) Indigenous Digital Life: The Practice
and Politics of Being Indigenous on Social Media.

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 Social media 239
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Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=30757372.
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