PROGRAM

We are living through an epidemic of violence against women and girls. In Australia, on average, one woman is killed every 11 days by an intimate partner. Globally, the World Health Organisation estimates that around one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes. Automation and artificial intelligence introduce new dimensions to an old problem. Perpetrators are using emerging technologies to exert control over women and girls in their personal, professional and public lives. AI and automated tools are shaping public discourses about violence against women and girls on digital platforms and beyond.

This panel brings together researchers working at the intersection of AI, automation and violence against women and girls from across the ADM+S. The panellists approach the problem from different angles, examining topics including: the use of AI and automation in the perpetration of gendered violence; the role of AI and automation in public discourses about intimate partner violence; how foundation models contribute to, or can be used to challenge, harmful narratives about women and girls; and how AI and automated tools can be used to support research in this space. From these different perspectives, panellists will reflect on how the research we are conducting within the ADM+S can help to create a safer world for women and girls.

People turn to search engines, social media, chatbots, smart wearables, and more for information on everyday health and well-being, and when facing serious injury or illness. In response, these systems moderate outputs related to such high-stakes topics by separating them into “Your Money or Your Life” content categories. However, owing to their commercial entanglements and constraints of information retrieval, these systems tend to privilege commercially advantageous content or content optimised for retrieval, resulting in commercial sources receiving greater visibility in search results, such as alcohol promotions being shown to adolescents, or situations where users are provided with biased, decontextualised, or outdated information.

This panel surfaces key limitations and opportunities of rapidly changing digital technologies for health information seeking by bringing together members of the Australian Search Experience 2.0 project. The speakers highlight these limitations and possibilities by drawing on their research on Google’s role in health information, the methodological and conceptual challenges of understanding how users search for health-related topics through different interfaces, the results of algorithmic audits around the topics of everyday health and infant nutrition, and more.

This panel explores the role of AI, automation, and data-driven systems in clinical healthcare, and their implications for health consumers, healthcare workers and systems of care. While AI tools and automated systems are increasingly promoted as ways to improve access to quality healthcare, they also introduce new uncertainties, anxieties, and ethical challenges for consumers, many of whom are already navigating complex and unequal healthcare systems shaped by specialised expertise and opaque data practices. We focus on questions about the capacity of technologies to adequately support and recognise diverse health needs and personal circumstances and address health equity challenges.

The panel examines the capabilities and constraints within healthcare systems increasingly mediated by data and AI technologies, including clinical AI scribes and other forms of automation. It considers the implications these systems have for healthcare workers and health consumers alike, including changing relationships of trust, expertise, and care. Attention is also given to the hidden costs and unintended consequences of digital, data, and AI transformations in healthcare, including the ethical tensions produced by shifting forms of mediation and the emergence of alternative, and often untested, sources of health expertise enabled through initiatives such as ChatGPT Health.

The discussion draws on insights from the national consumer sentiment survey conducted by the Consumers Health Forum of Australia; findings from Albury’s ARC Future Fellowship project on digital and data capabilities in sexual and reproductive health; and research from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society Signature Project, Critical Capabilities for Inclusive AI, examining TGA regulation of automation, relational ethics and AI scribes in healthcare.

This panel draws together work from the ADM+S signature project, the Australian Ad Observatory, bringing into dialogue several case studies from the project. The panel examines how digital promotional cultures are shaping health practices, decisions and subjectivities, attending to the complex and often opaque commercial environments in which consumers navigate health information, products and services online.

The research presentations will address:
– How social media platforms target alcohol advertising to people at-risk of harm (Aimee Brownbill)
– ‘Managing, hacking, personalising and financing your fertility’ (Giselle Newton)
– ‘Health biographies, digital health cultures and health ads’ (Phoebe Price-Barker, Giselle Newton and Madeleine Stirling)
– ‘Looksmaxxing – botox, beauty modification – adjacent to manosphere’ (Kiah Hawker)
– Ads of a feather: Topical ad sequences and their relationship to health (Khanh Luong and Dan Angus)

Together, the papers reflect on the methodological challenges of making digital advertising legible to researchers, regulators and civil society, as well as foregrounding how promotional cultures and infrastructures increasingly mediate health

Automated systems create digital environments where the line between legitimate promotion and exploitation can be difficult to discern. This facilitated roundtable discussion examines how people navigate — and how researchers can study — the cultures of risk, harm and self-protection that now define everyday encounters with online advertising.

Drawing on research undertaken in the Australian Ad Observatory involving qualitative, computational and cultural methods, the panel will discuss four interconnected perspectives.
– The first examines how consumers develop folk knowledge and practical diagnostics for identifying scam advertising, drawing on interview data to explore the heuristics, lore and labour involved in everyday scam detection.
– The second attends to the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of contemporary promotional culture — the brainrot, hustle aesthetics and enshittification that characterise the visual and rhetorical texture of low-quality advertising.
– The third situates gambling and financial speculation within a broader ecosystem of risk-taking promotional culture, examining how advertising normalises speculative financial behaviour alongside wider cultures of hustle and chance.
– The fourth addresses the methodological challenge of detecting scam advertising at scale, evaluating computational approaches — including vision-based and OCR methods — against the edge cases and ambiguities that keyword-based detection cannot resolve.

Across these perspectives we explore how digital cultures characterised by risk, speculation and hustling affect health and wellbeing. These risks extend across addictive and exploitative commodities like gambling to novel direct-to-consumer health and wellness products to the affects of risk-taking and speculation on financial, mental and social wellbeing.

This panel examines how digital migration infrastructures, including social media platforms, search systems, influencers, and diaspora networks, shape migrant wellbeing and mental health in Australia. Drawing on emerging research with Indonesian Working Holiday Visa (WHV) migrants, the session explores how migrants increasingly rely on digital platforms not only for migration information, but also for emotional support, social connection, and everyday survival in conditions of uncertainty and precarity.

Recent scholarship in migration and platform studies has shown that digital platforms function as infrastructures through which mobility, aspiration, and belonging are organised. However, for migrants, these infrastructures are also deeply affective. Influencer content, messaging groups, search systems, and diasporic online communities shape how migrants navigate loneliness, trust, aspiration, and emotional wellbeing. At the same time, algorithmic visibility and platform cultures often privilege idealised migration narratives, creating uneven information environments and emotional pressures surrounding success, mobility, and belonging.

The panel begins with a short presentation of digital ethnographic research and fieldwork findings on Indonesian holidaymakers migrants in Australia, focusing on migrants’ information-seeking practices, platform imaginaries, and experiences of loneliness and support. This will be followed by a moderated interdisciplinary discussion featuring migration and digital media scholars, members of the ADM+S Search Experience team, and community-based migrant support actors. The panel concludes with a discussant reflection on digital media, infrastructures of care, and mediated belonging. By foregrounding migrant mental health within discussions of digital infrastructures and platform governance, the panel contributes to broader conversations about migration, multiculturalism, and the human consequences of algorithmically mediated mobility.

The Australian Government is currently preparing legislation for a new Digital Duty of Care for digital platforms and other online service providers. By the time of the Symposium, the exposure draft should be available for consultation.

This facilitated panel discussion brings together diverse perspectives to ask: What does the new Digital Duty of Care propose to change? How effectively does it address our shared concern for a ‘good’ digital society, one that supports individual and collective wellbeing online? What will effective implementation require and how will researchers, civil society and regulatory bodies be involved? Drawing on a policy brief developed by researchers at ADM+S and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) (to be published n coming weeks), the panel frames the discussion around three interconnected questions.
– First, what are the goals that the Digital Duty of Care should be designed to achieve and how can we move from narrow conceptions of risk and harm to broader conceptions of the good digital society?
– Second, how can the Duty itself be designed and implemented to move beyond a narrower focus on risks to online safety, to respect the rights of Australians to participate online, and support long-term public value in the digital environment?
– Third, what does meaningful transparency and observability look like for researchers, civil society and regulatory bodies? And what will it mean for our ongoing work?

The panel will draw on empirical research from the ADMS Regulatory Project, Australian Ad Observatory and other work, as well as the lived experience of Australians through the involvement of the Alannah and Madeleine Foundation and other partners. The panel aims to produce actionable insights for researchers, regulators and civil society about the new Digital Duty of Care and to advance the public discussion about how it should be designed and implemented.