What do young Australians think about the 'Social Media Ban'? Join young people and researchers online to find out what the upcoming changes mean for 12-15 year olds from around Australia. 🗓 Mon, 1 Dec 2025 ⏰ 9:00am Perth ⏰ 11:00am Bris ⏰ 12:00pm Syd/Melb 👉 www.eventbrite.com.au/e/webinar-am...

My 2 year old has just entered his diggers phase in earnest, so it's been nothing short of a revelation to find that the @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org Internet Archive has a downloadable legal collection of the first 10 seasons of Bob the Builder!

We're very lucky having @kelleyhas2es.bsky.social present today at Curtin University for CCAT on Platform Epistemology: Shaping Algorithmic Knowledge in the Visibility Game, on the first leg of Kelley's Australian tour!

After six years on the @aoir.bsky.social Exec Committee, I logged out of AoIR’s Insta acct yesterday, my very last task for the Exec. AoIR has been my core academic community for a long time, & the end of my time on the Exec has provoked some thoughts & feelings: www.tamaleaver.net/2025/11/05/r...

Interested in data centers? In critical data center studies? Here's an open biblio -- anyone can add or borrow from it. Please do add anything that's missing. Enjoy! docs.google.com/document/d/1...

We would like to thank guest editors Jin Lee @jinlee.bsky.social, Crystal Abidin, and Tama Leaver @tamaleaver.bsky.social (Curtin University, Australia) for bringing together this special issue on TikTok and Children.

Have you read our 28.5 issue yet? Follow the thread to know more about the articles 🧶

🚨NEW PAPER ALERT 🚨 @tamigraph.bsky.social @briana-v.bsky.social and I discuss wellness chatbots, their labor implications, & "private vibes" vs "privacy". We call for critical human-AI communication scholarship that takes into account context & political economy: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Genuinely surprised Musk called his right-wing Wikipedia rip off Grokipedia and completely missed the opportunity to call it his X-Files. He's losing his edge! ;) Elon Musk launches new AI-generated site Grokipedia to rival 'left-biased' Wikipedia

We welcome the Albanese government ruling-out a text-and-data-mining exemption for Big Tech. By itself, this decision is insufficient. The Government needs to recognise that all Australians are creative individuals who deserve protection, not just those who make a living from artistic work.

Good on Australia for doing this! It’s such a deceptive practice to tell customers their price is increasing because of AI, when the old price is still available without genAI but only if you try to cancel.

Charlie the Unicorn (yes, that one, of Candy Mountain fame) was released this day 20 years ago. Memes are old. So am I. Relive the joy/horror: www.youtube.com/watc...

Australia's children's commissioner Anne Hollonds has seen "nothing" to address gaps in community and support left by the teen social media ban. A year after first raising the alarm, Hollonds says we need to take a "good, hard look at the unmet needs" of vulnerable kids. www.crikey.com.au/20...

The Right to Delete would just solve so many persistent problems in the ways personal data is misused or left open to attacks/hacks/poor security etc. As a Right it wouldn't HAVE to be used in every case (that's part of the point), but having the option is so very powerful. 100% backing this!

With a significant number of kids and parents planning on getting around the teen social media ban, experts and tech companies are warning about the "greater potential harms" for kids using the adult internet without guardrails and on dodgier alternative platforms. www.crikey.com.au/20...

For anyone still wondering: THIS IS WHY WE’RE HERE. Welcome to our family, and thank you for welcoming us to yours. #AoIR2025

For all of you with #AoIR2025 FOMO, or who are missing the great company in Rio already: consider joining us in Brisbane for the 2026 @qutdmrc.bsky.social Summer School on 2-6 Feb. 2026 – registration is now open ! More details are here:

😢 Oh man, it is genuinely the end of an era saying goodbye to our @aoir.bsky.social Association Coordinator Michelle Gardner at the end of #AoIR2025. Thank you SO much for everything you have done for the Association, Michelle. You’ll always be welcome in our community. 🫂

Thoroughly enjoying this roundtable on the Australian social media ban at #aoir2025 with @tamaleaver.bsky.social @snurb.info and Dan Angus

A touching memorial for our friend and colleague, Jonathan Sterne. #AoIR2025

The privacy commissioner has warned tech companies that collecting too much data to check user's ages for the teen social media ban could be illegal under Australia's privacy laws. This comes as the OAIC releases its privacy rules for ban: www.crikey.com.au/20...

One more piece of the Australian Under16s Social Media Ban/Delay puzzle has been put on the table today with Carly Kind and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner releasing their guidance on how platforms and other entities should interpret the ban in terms of privacy. [1/4]

Almost like outsourcing more and more public service functions to consultants might not be a good thing.

T-minus one week to #AoIR2025, my first time in Brazil! 🌐🇧🇷

and here we go: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/...

So, OpenAI's Sora app is 10-second ChatGPT/AI-generated videos (now with audio) in an endless feed. Doesn't that just make it all the shitty bits of TikTok in basically the same format? Am I missing something? openai.com/index/sora-2...

This is not how copyright works. Literally, the opposite. Also, this is legally stupid because it shows they can remove the work. Ergo, they have no defense for including it in the first place.

The highlight of Anthony Albanese's trip to the UN was spruiking Australia's teen social media ban. You'd be forgiven for thinking it was already a smash hit. But not only has it not come into effect, there are some basic parts of the ban that remain a complete mystery www.crikey.com.au/20...

Great work from @marcuscarter.com & team, investigating the inconsistencies around gaming, gambling, loot boxes and the impact of new(ish) Australian regulation. Loot boxes are still rife in kids’ mobile games, despite ban on ‘gambling-like’ features theconversation.com/loot-boxes-a...

Instagram hits 3 billion monthly users www.theverge.com/news/784784/... Or to put it a different way: there are as many people using Instagram each month as the were people on the planet Earth in 1960.

Just three weeks until #AoIR2025 Ruptures kicks off in Niterói, Brazil, and we can't wait to see you all!

interesting bit in a Lancet article re: Australia's teen social media ban: surprisingly the amount of socialising in person hasn't dropped significantly in the past 25 years, and certainly not by the average amount of social media use.

Meta have started algorithmically finding under18s in Australia who claimed to be over 18, & shifting them to Teen Insta accounts. about.fb.com/news/2025/04... On 10 Dec, presumably those identified thus as under16 will be the first wave of Meta/FB/Insta deactivations as the ban starts.

As I wrote last week: there are age verification providers who have already built the racial profiling and discrimination modules to plug into their offerings the minute they legally can. internet.exchangepoint.tech/the-dog-that...

I was pleased to chat with @australia.theguardian.com team who actually looked at the Age Assurance trial data, finding racial & other biases of concern before the trial are still very evident in the trial's actual data (downplayed in the official summaries): www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

A Palestinian guy escaped to Europe on jet ski and used ChatGPT to plan, including how much fuel was needed. A funny thing that's buried is that they ran out of fuel 20km from their destination -- presumably because ChatGPT's estimate was wrong? lmao www.reuters.com/worl...

The social media saga has produced its fair share of intrigue. But the latest big reveal on how the the ban will work has left us with just another cliff hanger, writes Ange Lavoipierre.

This year’s Nancy Baym Book Award committee would also like to give an Honourable Mention to @tbonini.bsky.social and @emilianotrere.com for Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight Against Platform Power (@mitpress.bsky.social). Congratulations also!

AoIR is pleased to congratulate the winners of this year’s Nancy Baym Book Award ‪@aramsinn.bsky.social‬ & @jesgilbert.bsky.social for The Secret Life of Data: Navigating Hype and Uncertainty in the Age of Algorithmic Surveillance (@mitpress.bsky.social). Congratulations! aoir.org/2025nb_booka...

Watching the promotional material for Apple's new AirPods, it's notable just how much #accessibility is being positioned as the terrain big tech wants to colonise, and in the long-run, personalise, locking users into their ecosystem.

Just over a month until #AoIR2025 in Brazil! How exciting!

Why we need the arts and humanities: Reason # 4 million. People think of film as a product, not a collaborative creative endeavor of human minds and bodies capturing a piece of lived experience. variety.com/2025/film/ne...

Oh, this is so deeply unsettling. Watching big tech pay fealty to Trump in word and action to avoid regulation and basically deploy their own versions of the future without any guardrails is just chilling.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Here is my latest for The Conversation, on the results of Australia’s #ageassurance trial ahead of the #socialmediaban that will come into effect in December

News Corp's Courier Mail linked a teen girl's suicide bullying on social media as part of its campaign for the <16 ban. But the child's parents said she wasn't bullied on social media. Which News would have known if they contacted them before publishing.

I had a good chat with Natarsha Belling on The Briefing Podcast today discussing the Age Assurance Trial results and what that means for the government's under16 social media ban. #auspol 🎧 play.listnr.com/podcast/the-...

Josh Taylor in The Guardian notes that actually looking at the data from the Australian Age Assurance trial shows some big problems! Not just under-16s: all Australian social media users will need to prove their age – and it could be complicated and time consuming www.theguardian.com/...

The Australian Age Assurance Technology Trial claims that age assurance can work in Australia, but their own evidence proves the opposite. You can read the full 10 volumes of the report here: www.infrastructure.gov.au/department/m... My top level concerns are in a thread below ... [1/5]