From Fake News to Echo-Chambers: On The Limitations of New Media for Environmental Activism in Australia, and “Activist-Responsive Adaptation”

ABSTRACT

For environmental activism, new media are now essential campaign tools to better protect the environment and enhance sustainability. The literature, however, poses some limitations for such purpose. Prominently, increasing concentration of new media ownership, and government digital surveillance; also ones of communication. Given little attention to new media limitations for Australian environmental activism or internationally, our focus was to better understand how Australian activists perceived and responded to these limitations on the effectiveness of their activism. Analysis involved interviews with activists regarding Australia-wide fracking and old-growth forest logging campaigns. Activists brushed aside surveillance due to the democratic legitimacy of their activities, also media concentration as an issue beyond them to address with any immediacy. Instead, they focussed on immediate practical issues around communication effectiveness, including new media information overload, fake news, digital echo-chambers, and trolls. In response to these issues, we identified an “activist-responsive adaptation” strategic approach that sought to both limit such intrusions and adapt communication to more effectively engage with audiences. More broadly, to address these issues and the bigger ones of surveillance and media concentration, socially responsible regulation of new media technology and communication was suggested.

KEYWORDS:

• New media
• communication
• environmental activism
• Australia
• fracking
• old-growth forest logging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘new media’ refers to digital information communication technologies. In the literature, alternative terms including ‘online’, ‘digital’, ‘social’, and ‘platform’ media also refer to these technologies (Siapera, 2018, pp. viii-xiii). However, on their own, these terms are limited because they refer to ‘specific’ technological components of these media. For example, online media refers to the Internet component; digital media emphasizes the technical differences of these media versus analogue media; and social media refers to the ‘interactivity’ component of social networks (Siapera, 2018). Similarly, in relation to platform media, the emphasis is on interactivity and connectivity (van Dijck et al., 2018). In contrast, the term ‘new media’ is inclusive of all these components of communication above (Menke & Schwarzenegger, 2019).

2 See https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/G/Green%20Politics.htm.

3 Our concept of ‘activist-responsive adaptation’ is adapted from Mulligan et al. (2017), who applied the concept of ‘community-responsive adaptation’ to frequent local flooding, for example, from climate change extreme weather events.

4 Through clickbaiting links, readers are enticed to click on ‘catchy’ headlines, and which subsequently open distracting information streams, such as doomsayer or celebrity news (Potthast et al., 2016).

5 Our study, we believe, represents the most up-to-date research on this topic. New media, also social media, was regularly checked over time regarding any other studies on the topic in Australia to 14 July 2021 on Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Google. We thus posit that the research is the only research conducted of this nature with environmental activists in Australia (and there is little internationally to compare it to); thereby making an original contribution to the literature, and offers a seminal reference point for further inquiry of this nature. Moreover, of further import, is that the campaign status of environmental activism has not changed in Australia, and there has been little policy shift to address the issues raised by environmental activists in the ensuing years since 2017. It is thus highly unlikely that the views expressed in this research around the use of new media by the respondents would have changed in any notable way either. In sum, we posit the research offers an invaluable source of information and research for further studies on the topic addressed in the article.

6 See https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/national-statement-ethical-conduct-human-research-2007-updated-2018.