PUBLISHED
Enforcing platform sovereignty: A case study of platform responses to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code (2024)
New Media and Society
Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code requires Google and Facebook to negotiate payments with news publishers for news content appearing on the platforms. Facebook and Google lobbied against the code through a highly visible public-facing campaign across their interfaces including News Feeds, Google Search and Home Page, and You Tube, and culminated in Facebook banning Australian users from accessing Australian news and related content. This article presents the findings of a detailed study of platform discourse in response to the News Media Bargaining Code and investigates the role of the user interface in platform power. The findings suggest Facebook and Google’s discursive strategies were deployed to protect, strengthen and enforce platform sovereignty.
Journalism unions and digital platform regulation (2023)
Media International Australia
With Dr Tai Neilson. In this article, we ask: what is the role of labour unions in shaping digital platform regulation? As our case study, we analysed how Australia's journalism union (the MEAA) articulated the interests of news workers in submissions to the Digital Platform Inquiry and the resulting News Media Bargaining Code. Through a critical discourse analysis of the union's submissions, we found that the MEAA's lobbying efforts championed the interests of freelancers, advocated for a more inclusive Code, and sought guarantees that the revenue it generated would be used to pay for content creation, despite being constrained by the hegemony of market-centric discourses that framed the inquiry and shaped the policy outcomes.
IN PRESS
Fat burlesque as gender exploration: An autoethnography of corpulence and feminine flaunting (2025)
The Fat Performance Reader, Intellect Books
This chapter will appear in the forthcoming edited collection, The Fat Performance Reader, which will sit at the intersection of fat studies and performance studies. My chapter presents an autoethnographic account of embodied femininity and gender identity through fat burlesque performance. It examines how becoming a fat performer led to a new expression of femininity and experience of gender euphoria on stage and in so doing, situates fat performance as a tool for queer identity formation and exploration. The discussion opened up through fat performance raises the question of whether fatness, existing outside the norms of traditional masculinity and femininity, can be considered a form of gender in its own right.
UNDER REVIEW
User Unfriendly: An analysis of Afterpay’s privacy policy and terms of service (2024)
Afterpay’s terms of service and privacy policy purport to inform users of their rights and responsibilities when using the platform. These documents claim to outline how Afterpay collects, uses and shares user data, what data is collected, and why. However, a critical discourse analysis of these documents has found them to be long, legalistic and complex, with vague and broad language, and a user interface difficult to navigate. Further, the documents are both clickwrap and sneak in contracts, meaning users must agree to the policies in order to access the service, but that policy can be unilaterally changed by Afterpay at any time. Rather than inform consumers, the terms of service and privacy policy appear designed purely to protect Afterpay’s legal interests.
The politics of ‘fintech’: A discourse analysis of the Australian Parliamentary fintech debate (2024)
Fintech is a term used regularly by the media, government, and digital platforms themselves to describe financial services mediated through digital technology. Since entering the popular lexicon less than two decades ago, fintech has become synonymous with innovation, disruption, and economic growth. With fintech regulation fast becoming a key part of the global policy agenda, it is important to consider how the term is used in policy settings and how such uses influence regulatory outcomes. This article applies a discourse analysis to the debate around fintech in the Australian Parliament and uses fintech app Afterpay as a case study to seek to understand how the term operates politically. My analysis, based on parliamentary speeches and key documents from the Senate Fintech Inquiry, shows that parliamentary debate is heavily focused on the opportunities and benefits of fintech, to the exclusion of any consideration of risks and harms.
THESIS
Switching off the news: What a discourse analysis of digital platforms’ response to Australia’s News Media and Digital Platforms Bargaining Code reveals about ideology and power (2022)
Master of Research, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature, Macquarie University
Supervisor: Dr Christopher John Müller
On 17 February 2021, Facebook restricted the posting and sharing of news in Australia. After many months of silence, this was Facebook’s final tactic in its campaign to avoid being regulated under Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code. The Code is aimed at addressing the power imbalance between digital platforms and news publishers, particularly Google and Facebook, which are the subjects of this thesis. Following a Foucauldian framework, this thesis employs a discourse analysis of platforms’ responses to The Code, to examine what this reveals about platform power and ideology, and how these contributed to a social, economic, and technological landscape where platforms were able to switch off the news. This thesis concludes that platforms use their discursive power to reinforce their dominant ideology of neoliberalism via the attention economy, and push towards platform sovereignty. In particular, platforms interpellate users as subjects through the graphical user interface and the unprecedented access this provides, to facilitate maximum data production, extraction, and monetisation of user attention. Google and Facebook have also used their dominant ideological position and censorial power to issue threats to governments who may be considering future regulation.