“YouTube’s predator problem”: Platform moderation as governance-washing, and user resistance

YouTube experienced large-scale criticism in early 2019 for predatory behavior toward children on the platform. To address concerns about children’s safety, YouTube acted quickly by demonetizing and deactivating comments on videos featuring minors. In this paper, we analyze both the company’s response to this scandal and how users received that response. We argue that YouTube’s reaction was governance-washing, which presents the appearance of vigorous platform moderation and leverages popular perceptions of technology to create the look of authority while deflecting questions about substance. While YouTubers and users did not dispute that the pedophilic comments were heinous, they questioned the effectiveness of the company’s solutions, arguing that YouTube’s platform governance actions did not solve the problem. Ultimately, we show that users have cogent critiques of governance policies that pretend to be comprehensive but fail to solve what they purport to address, and offer up the term “governance-washing” as a useful framework to make sense of such cases.

Interactive documentary and the reinvention of digital journalism, 2015–2020

Interactive documentary (i-docs), an innovative hybrid form at the intersection of film, journalism, and digital games, has matured beyond its first wave of experimentation, gaining distinction among the most highly evolved immersive media of the twenty-first century. The latest generation of i-docs is currently winning accolades at both major film festivals and game design summits. This study charts the evolutionary trajectory of North America’s most recent and influential wave of i-docs in works mostly appearing since 2015. It culturally situates i-docs as immersive media that extend experimentation with narrative journalism into the realm of fine art and social activism. Building on the foundation of activist, highly empathic news experiences established in the early 2010s, the most recent advances in i-docs range from live action VR to animated digital games. Such works include the Canadian National Film Board’s 2018 AR (augmented reality) experience East of the Rockies, Occupied’s 2019 Cannes entry The Holy City VR, Roger Ross Williams’ 2019 Tribeca debut Traveling While Black, and iNK Stories Verité VR Series’ 2017 Blindfold and Hero, winner of the prestigious Storyscapes Award at Tribeca in 2018. The vanguard of i-docs has expanded collaboration between film, news, and digital game industries to provide new forms of citizen engagement through advocacy journalism aimed at social and political change. Through the use of John Pavlik’s (2019) critical framework for understanding immersive journalism, this article examines the texts, producers, and industrial contexts of the most recent and influential North American i-docs, as one branch of the form defined by Gaudenzi, Aston, and Rose. Principles of transparency, social responsibility, and a commitment to veracity in i-docs epitomize the esthetic and political potential of digital journalism as an empathic alternative to traditional news coverage.

Reddit’s cops and cop-watchers: Resisting and insisting on change in online interpretive communities

This study explores how two subreddits—r/Bad_Cop_No_Donut (Donut) and r/ProtectAndServe (PnS)—function as online interpretive communities discussing the same topic: police conduct. Members of Donut construct a genre from videos depicting a history of police violence in order to advocate for policing reform, arguing that cop-watching practices that produce this genre are essential to driving changes in policing. Members of PnS construct a genre from similar videos in order to advocate for resisting systemic reform, reading these videos as professional development opportunities for police to reestablish legitimacy with the public. Donut insists on change, while PnS resists change. Donut produces a discourse which engages with historical instances of police misconduct; PnS produces a discourse which rarely engages with this history. Studying these processes of interpretation reveals how dissonant meanings can arise from the same material, how meaning is made in communities consuming and repurposing texts, and how historical narratives are essential to challenging structural inequity.

Netflix in Turkey: Localization and audience expectations from video on demand

Drawing on in-depth interviews with users of Netflix and the local streaming service BluTV as well as analysis of press releases, and original TV series produced by these platforms, this study explores the emergence and impact of Video on Demand (VOD) in Turkey. It examines how VOD is adopted, negotiated, reformulated, and received in a non-Western context where global and local VOD platforms compete, substitute and emulate each other. We ask the following research question: What are Turkish audiences’ social, psychological and technological needs and expectations from global and local VOD platforms? In order to respond to this question, we explore Turkish audiences’ insight into what VOD means to them and offers them as content, in comparison with platforms’ marketing discourse. The article argues that a) the local content that platforms offer is a central juncture through which audiences articulate their larger expectations from VODs, and b) Netflix’s localization attempts do not always correspond with the audience demand, it is heavily critiqued and at times rejected by the local audience. The findings of this research indicate that the expectations, needs, and gratifications of Netflix and VOD audiences depend on three factors: Their interpretation of VODs’ local content in relation to their cultural experience with broadcast TV, their technological needs such as instant access to global content and time/space shifting opportunities, and lastly the political context and policies such as the internet regulation and censorship. The significance of this is study is in showing, as distinct from the abundant literature on localization of Netflix, the complexity of local taste. Audiences’ evaluation of a VOD is shaped simultaneously by multiple factors including their experiences with network TV, other VODs, media regulations as well as informal networks/piracy.

Dynamic roles of social presence and individual differences in social TV platforms

These days, many individuals engage in a unique form of TV viewing that includes a simultaneous act of watching television content and talking about it with others in a mediated environment. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as social TV viewing. Responding to the popularity of this form of TV viewing behavior, the present study examines the individual differences of the social TV viewing experience, particularly with regard to different communication platforms (e.g. private vs. public). Based on the data collected from an online survey, primary findings indicate that extroverted and lonely individuals have different social TV viewing experiences such as preferences for a particular type of platforms for social TV viewing. Further, social presence plays an important role in the understanding of social TV enjoyment in private and public platforms.

Visualising policy responses during health emergencies. Learning from the COVID-19 policy trackers

Data visualisations are intimately connected to the emergence of public health as a discipline and policy area. Besides the mapping of cases and deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an explosion of attempts to track policy responses. They have come from actors sometimes initially unfamiliar with public and global health. In this paper, we analyse seven of the most successful tracker initiatives that have sought to map governments’ reactions to COVID-19 and reflect on our own. When not led by international organisations, the trackers primarily rely on networks of volunteer country expert contributors (who need to be incentivised in the medium term). The vertical crowdsourcing approach means that, despite good intentions, contributors have a relatively limited agency in shaping the trackers. Maps and timelines comparing countries are the most popular visualisations; they suggest that (some) policy solutions can be found abroad and rely on policy taxonomies established by the trackers’ core teams. We contend that such taxonomies, which compete with each other, constitute attempts to frame the complex issue of which policies matter in responding to COVID-19. All the projects are large and complex and often without a well-defined intended audience. We hypothesise that the popularity (in terms of backlinks) of the most successful tracker arises from the fact that it sums up COVID-19 policies in one easily visualisable indicator. We suggest that the trackers are a more helpful emergency policy tool when they provide contextual information, keep policy details or refer to them (rather than only reduce them to categories), and suggest ways to link different elements—including the relationship between health or societal outcomes and policies.

Convenient and worth the price? Identifying early users and predicting future use of book streaming services

The printed book has been resilient to change, and the adoption of e-books has been slow. In this context, few studies have addressed a potential turn to streaming services for books. This paper examines the adoption of book streaming in the Norwegian market, where the market-leaders Storytel and Fabel report rapid increases in number of subscribers. We examine who these early adopters are, and what may predict future use of streaming services among non-users. Theoretically, the study is situated within the fields of innovation diffusion and technology acceptance. The study is based on a cross-sectional online survey with a representative sample of the Norwegian population. Results show that users are younger and more educated, and that book streaming is more popular among women than men. The audiobook format allows for flexible ways of consuming books, complementing rather than replacing the printed book. For non-users, results show that convenience value and price value predict behavioural intention to use book streaming services. While emotional attachment to printed books has been found to act as a barrier for adoption of e-books, its negative effect on behavioural intention for book streaming services is only modest.

Situating the videogame maker’s agency through craft

It is now widely accepted that videogames are a cultural form, and that they generate cultural meaning through the possibilities and constraints through which they shape players’ experiences and choices. However, the cultural processes through which videogames are themselves produced remain understudied and too-straightforwardly imagined. The videogame maker does not simply conceive of a videogame idea and then execute it. Instead, the videogame is produced through processes of negotiation and iteration between videogame maker, software and hardware environments and the broader expectations of the field. In this sense, videogame production can be fruitfully understood through the lens of craft. I argue that in order to politicise agency in digital play, as is this special issue’s goal, videogame research must also consider the agency of the videogame maker, and the iterative, embodied, and social processes through which videogames are produced. This article draws from interviews with videogame makers and existing research on craft production to provide a preliminary consideration of how the agency of the videogame maker as a cultural producer can be accounted for.

Facts of (Financial) Life: Political Power and Re-Visualization Strategies

Digital visualizations have seen an exponential rise in use by politicians, candidates, and other political actors. Digital visualizations are an informative and engaging genre, but when applied by political candidates, they may also be used to persuade or mislead. However, the ways in which different actors utilize them have yet to receive systematic scholarly attention. Informed by a comprehensive theoretical framework related to political power, digital visualizations, and social media campaigns, I perform grounded qualitative content analysis of all cost-of-living visualizations posted to Facebook during the 2015 Israeli election period, by both peripheral and primary political actors. I define two main argumentation strategies ( Progress Makers & Hinderers and Re-Visualized Economy) reliant on different narrative, visual, and information-oriented strategies by different actors. An overview of the findings reveals digital visualizations as a meeting ground between the political power of actors, the rhetorical power of emotionality, and the cultural-political power of numbers. I conclude with a reflection on re-visualization as a means of expanding a fourth type of power, discursive power, wherein visualizations are used as a tool for resistance by weaker actors, against the narrative of reality promoted by stronger actors, relying on the rhetorical affordances of the digital political visualization genre to increase their political power. Digital visualizations thus offer a uniquely agile tool for political actors of all types to utilize in gaining discursive power in the competition over election narratives in the digital arena of social media.

‘This is a House’: Large Image Collections and Their Platform Embeddings

This paper analyses the active role of image collections in supporting platforms and their operations. Large image collections are increasingly present on media, scientific and other platforms. A case study of Facebook’s predictive modelling of satellite images of human settlement exemplifies how image collections are changing. The treatment of images in a predictive model – a deep neural network – constructs a condensed indexical field, a field that allows the platform to generate referential statements about the world. Under platform conditions, image collections function less as archives or records and more as densely woven indexical fields that orient, position and embed the platform. In describing the transformation of image collections, the paper points to important changes in how platforms use images to position themselves in the world.