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Introduction On 30 May 2017, a video was posted to an official Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)

Twitter account to promote the upcoming television special Hack Live: Is Male Privilege Bullsh!t?

(ABC2, 30 May 2017). The special, which was to be broadcast on 20 June, was designed to bring together feminist and anti-feminist writers, journalists, and provocateurs to discuss whether men were privileged by social and economic advantages. A Twitter hashtag, #HackLive, was provided for users wishing to participate in the discussion. In the video, host Tom Tilley is featured in stereotypically masculine locales, such as an old-fashioned reading room – reading a newspaper, and reclining on a sumptuous dark leather armchair – and a barbershop. As Tilley transitions between these backdrops he speaks into the camera, asking the viewer if male privilege, described as being “in some kind of man’s club”, really exists. Tilley reports that a “growing group of men say they got it tougher” than women, despite evidence that would seemingly contradict this – such as men earning higher incomes on average, and outnumbering women in Parliament. To settle the debate, Tilley announces that Hack

Live has invited men and women to discuss “who’s really got it better”. At the end of the video, a female barber raises a razor to Tilley’s neck: he asks her, with a coy glance to the camera, “this won’t get bloody, will it?” The video thus foreshadowed the criticism that Hack Live would receive from

Twitter users and social news outlets: that the programme was exploiting gendered conflict, and gendered violence, for news value.

‘Social news’ is a term used to describe an emerging news genre. It shares the sociable vernaculars of popular internet culture and challenges traditional journalistic norms around objectivity through its frequent use of explicit perspective and argumentation which consistently identifies with and supports progressive politics. This case study will highlight the role of the social news genre’s most prominent examples in Australia – BuzzFeedOz News, Junkee, and Pedestrian.tv – within the social media ritual

1 around Hack Live. What I mean by a ‘social media ritual’ will be explained below. All three born- digital outlets have significant social media followings. Articles about the Hack Live broadcast from other outlets will also be analysed.

The term social news has previously been used in reference to content aggregator platforms such as

Newsvine, Digg, and Reddit. Users on these platforms share articles and videos sourced from elsewhere, which are then rated according to their perceived merits (Goode, 2009; Wasike, 2011).

This use mostly understood ‘social news’ in relation to participatory practices and the platform affordances which enabled these. It neglected other aspects of being social, importantly those associated with sociability, and how the form and content of news could promote these. Sociability here refers to the “impulse” to be social and the pleasure in being associated with others (Simmel,

1971, p. 128). Conversely, the social news of my conception refers to outlets that are embedded within social media platforms, and which are sociable in the sense of sharing the pro-social communicative styles common to the cultures of these platforms.

In this case study, I reconstruct in narrative terms the social media ritual that arose from the Hack Live male privilege episode. Using a combination of large-scale social media analytics and close textual analysis, I chronicle the Hack Live ritual’s development over 20-23 June 2017, and highlight key moments and actors within it. Tweet data were sourced from a sample that contained all the tweets that used the keywords “#HackLive” and “Hack Live” in the 20-23 June period, but since not all tweets about Hack Live used the hashtag, it was also necessary to manually track and examine some additional tweets. Throughout the ritual, I emphasise its ongoing meta character, as both social news outlets and Twitter participants commented not just on issues discussed on Hack Live, but also on how the discussion was framed. Moreover, I demonstrate that social news actors – the Twitter accounts of writers and journalists employed by these outlets – were embedded within the interactions, commentary, and conversations taking place in and around the #HackLive hashtag. I argue that their articles reflected the arguments and platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al., 2015) – the grammars, styles, and logics of communication – of politically progressive Twitter. This platform vernacular was partly derived from the affordances of Twitter, with its (then) 140-character limit and open network, which

2 can encourage snarky and humorous public performativity, to be rewarded with potential likes, retweets, and followers. But it also shared the pop-culture sensibilities, irreverent informality, and widespread use of visual content, such as memes and GIFs, for personal and political expression that are found across social media platforms (Highfield, 2016; Highfield & Leaver, 2016). Due to all of this, I contend that social news should be understood as an emerging news genre of and for social media rituals. This study thus contributes to the growing body of literature on the transformations of journalism as it co-evolves with the affordances and cultures of social media platforms (Deuze &

Witschge, 2017). As demonstrated by the thoughtful media critique provided by these emerging social news outlets, this case study shows that such transformations can also be positive for democratic discourse in liberal societies.

The Hack Live event – the television programme and the social media activity around it, along with the news articles that both of these generated – may be best be understood as a social media ritual

(Highfield, 2016; Burgess, Mitchell & Münch, 2018). The term recalls earlier notions of ‘media rituals’ (Carey, 1989; Couldry, 2003): that the media do more than simply report concrete occurrences, but instead also invoke and sustain public conflicts and solidarities based around how society “should or ought to be”, and interrupt the everyday in a “ritualised” – thereby habitual and performative – fashion (Cottle, 2006, p. 415-416). At the same time, these media rituals work to inscribe, and reinscribe, the “myth” of the media as “society’s centre”: both as the central access point to social and political life and the ‘centre’ through which social conflict is mediated and resolved

(Couldry, 2003).

Social media rituals share these qualities, but occur within and through the affordances, cultures, and vernaculars of social media platforms. These rituals are an increasingly prominent aspect of public communication, conversation, and even mourning (Burgess, Mitchell & Münch, 2018), as social media become a part of everyday personal and political expression (Highfield, 2016). They are ritualised through platform-specific patterned responses to acute events, such as the use of event- specific hashtags (Bruns & Burgess, 2015), and are characterised by “the convergence of private and personal audience practices with public discourse, in networked publics” (Burgess, Mitchell &

Münch, 2018); the latter is exemplified through the blurring of personal reactions and public commentary in the #HackLive hashtag. However, struggles over the ‘centre’ are more visible than in earlier media rituals, imbuing these rituals with a meta quality: they are frequently not just about an issue or event, but also about how media outlets have covered these. This has been evident in previous instances of ritualised media criticism, such as the infamous ‘#avocadogate’, sparked by an Australian

News Corp columnist who suggested that millennials would need to cut down on expensive avocado toast if they ever wished to own a home (Hing, 2016). Although Hack Live was an attempt by public broadcast television to draw upon, appropriate, and ‘resolve’ antagonisms prominent on social media, many users on social media platforms resisted this appropriation through ironic and critical commentary – albeit still within the live #HackLive event. On the other hand, social news actors and articles, although participating in the critique of Hack Live, did not fundamentally challenge this

‘myth of the mediated centre’. The articles themselves were recaps or explainers, reporting on Hack

Live and critiquing its journalistic practices while at the same time reinscribing news media’s position as a central access point, even if for a more fragmented audience (young, educated, and pop culture- literate people).

In the first section of this study, I give context to the ritual and provide background for the main participants. In the second section, I describe how Hack Live promoted and framed its ‘debate’ on

Twitter, along with how it attempted to draw upon social media antagonisms between feminists and anti-feminists. Following this, I describe the critical and often ironic commentary deployed by users and social news actors on Twitter during the live broadcast. I follow this with an analysis of the social news articles reporting and commenting on Hack Live. I then discuss the findings from the previous sections, and draw out some broader conclusions about the case’s significance.

Context

BuzzFeedOz is the Australian-based bureau of the global digital media outlet BuzzFeed. The outlet was originally famous for its pop-culture ‘listicles’ (articles consisting of lists) and quizzes, but since foraying into journalism in 2012 has gained growing recognition for its ‘serious’ news content and

4 investigative work (Tandoc & Jenkins, 2017). Junkee, which launched in 2013, and Pedestrian.tv, in

2008, are Australian digital outlets aimed at a youth audience. Each regularly report on a wide mixture of pop culture, such as film, TV, music, and celebrities, as well as sport, travel, and politics.

These categories, however, are frequently blurred, as, for instance, articles on pop culture often contain political commentary.

Hack Live is a reoccurring panel-style programme which invites guests to discuss topical issues. It is produced by the ABC’s public service youth media outlet Triple J. The outlet is most famous for its popular youth radio FM station, which has long boasted a culture of irreverence (Albury, 1999).

Triple J’s reputation for railing against taboos can be traced back to what has become the station’s origin story, when in 1975 Double J, Triple J’s AM forerunner, aired Australian rock band Skyhooks’ song ‘You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good in Bed’ after the commercial stations refused to (Albury,

1999, p. 55). But, as the male hetero ribaldry of the Skyhooks song suggests, Triple J’s culture has also traditionally been masculine (Albury, 1999, p. 56). This has been most evident in the lack of female artists in its popular annual Top 100 music poll, the latter a fixture of annual Australia Day celebrations. BuzzFeedOz has been a notable critic of Triple J in this regard, which in 2015 resulted in a minor but public conflict between the two outlets (Christensen, 2015). Hack Live was informed by

Triple J’s masculine and edgy history in how the programme framed its ‘debate’ on male privilege, and in its decision to include provocative panellists.

Hack Live drew upon contemporary socio-political conflicts around issues such as domestic violence, sexist behaviour in the workplace, and misogyny online, and restaged them as a live ‘debate’ with the explicit promise of both enlightening discussion and spectacular controversy; this will be discussed further below. The usual textual qualities of liveness, documented previously in media studies scholarship (Hawkins, 2013; Levine, 2008; White, 1999), were on display: camera pans of the studio audience throughout the broadcast; direct speech to the camera from Tilley, who emphasised the liveness of Hack Live throughout the broadcast; the sense of spontaneity given by a fractious and predictably unpredictable panel; and technical glitches. And, as previous work has argued (Hawkins,

2013), these qualities served to evoke a sense of publicness: a public event, represented by the studio

5 audience and the tweets displayed on screen, of intrinsic public importance – for why else would it be broadcast live on public television? This publicness worked to naturalise Hack Live’s role as a central access point to, and mediator of, the social.

As a ‘debate’ format suggests, the panellists were evenly divided along ‘yes’ or ‘no’ lines regarding the question of male privilege, with the show thus establishing an artificial balance. The ABC itself has a troubled history with balance. Although impartiality (which includes a ‘balance’ that “follows the weight of evidence”) is enshrined in its editorial policy (ABC, 2011, p. 6), right-leaning governments and commentators have regularly accused the otherwise respected national public broadcaster of leftist bias ever since the era of conservative Prime Minister John Howard (in government 1996-2007). While these claims have been largely unfounded (Hawkins, 2013), the need to ‘perform’ balance to pre-empt such criticism would have likely occurred to the Hack Live producers. Regardless, as will be seen, accusations of bias appeared in the commentary around Hack

Live.

Like the other popular ABC panel programme Q&A (Dragiewicz & Burgess, 2016; Bruns & Burgess,

2015; Harrington et al., 2013) viewers were encouraged to contribute to a specific hashtag

(#HackLive), with curated tweets from the hashtag to be displayed on-screen during the live programme. The prepared hashtag, which was advertised weeks prior to the broadcast, demonstrated how Hack Live utilised the affordances of Twitter to draw upon the platform’s frequently combative and antagonistic publics for its own purposes. Recent born-digital, socio-cultural controversies such as Gamergate – an online movement in 2014 whose proponents claimed to advocate for “ethics in video games journalism”, but which according to its detractors was a reaction to the growing presence of women in gaming culture (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016; Gray et al., 2017) – demonstrate the intensity of social media ‘debates’ around feminism. Their potential for spectacular television would thus have been evident to the producers.

Pre-Broadcast

Weeks prior to the broadcast, Hack Live was already attracting criticism. On 1 June, in the legacy outlet The Sydney Morning Herald, columnist Ruby Hamad criticised the programme as an example of “balance as bias”, arguing that its superficial application of objectivity was problematic, as it over- represented fringe perspectives. She argued that Hack Live’s balanced approach risked placing Men’s

Rights Activists (‘MRAs’) and feminists on “equal footing” (Hamad, 1 June 2017). MRAs represent a radical strain of anti-feminism, being loosely comprised of males organised around the identity of being ‘men’, and who advocate ‘men’s issues’ while simultaneously complaining that feminism has marginalised and oppressed men (Coston & Kimmel, 2013; Jordan, 2016). They have a significant presence on anonymous platforms such as Reddit, and form part of the abusive ‘toxic technocultures’ that propagate on these platforms (Massanari, 2017). MRAs served as the major proponents on the programme’s ‘yes’ side when it came to the question of male privilege being “bullshit”. Hamad’s critique of forced balance has a history in scholarship (Dearing, 1995; Dixon & Clarke, 2013), most notably featured in Boykoff & Boykoff’s work on the over-representation of discredited perspectives in climate science coverage (2004).

Hamad’s concerns about Hack Live’s biased balance, and its exploitative sensationalising of social media antagonisms between feminists and MRAs, were validated by a series of promotional videos posted to the official @ABC2 and @triplejHack Twitter accounts. Each of these featured prominent and controversial actors within these online conflicts, many of whom were to be the programme’s panellists. Dramatic music, sharp cuts, and grainy footage were in display alongside provocative captions such as “is this woman a gender traitor?” (ABC2, 18 June 2017). This latter caption accompanied a video of a female MRA. All of these promotional tweets framed the Hack Live

‘debate’ as a gender battle, with each of the panellists introduced almost like fighters in an upcoming bout. One @ABC2 tweet even explicitly promoted the sensational conflict framing, claiming that

“tonight’s forecast” was “cloudy with a chance of sh!tstorm” (ABC2, 20 June 2017).

Unsurprisingly, the numerous replies to these @ABC2 and @triplejHack tweets were antagonistic, with those sympathising with MRAs at times outright abusing feminist users. Arguments that would become familiar during the live broadcast – MRAs claiming that feminists ignore male deaths in the workplace and do not want equality, and feminists arguing that MRAs disregard the role of toxic masculinity in male mental health issues – were already visible in these replies. Furthermore, the framing bias of news media was a frequent target. MRA-siding tweets accused the ‘leftie’ ABC of unfair treatment, while feminists criticised the ABC for giving, as one tweet put it, “domestic violence apologists” a “platform” (TakeDownMRAs, 18 June 2017).

Broadcast

Tweet text Retweet count @wine_mum: “Men are afraid to show up to MRA meetings” Women are afraid to walk 219 down the street #HackLive @TakedownMRAs: What Men’s Rights Activists are like when the camera’s not rolling. 172 #HackLive @JennaGuillaume: How I feel about #HackLive 113 @ABC2: Transgender activist @FindingNevo1 brought an interesting perspective to our 107 #HackLive debate on male privilege @mirandadevine: Charming… ABC apologises to Miranda Devine after Hack Live 96 insult – TV Tonight @TakedownMRAs: The Red Pill was produced by Mike here, for MRAs like Matt. 83 #HackLive @northonm31: To me, most of these MRAs are referencing problems caused by toxic 82 masculinity, not feminism. #HackLive @LucyXIV: Next on #HackLive: slavery, good or bad? Let’s hear both sides 79 @MichaelGLFlood: #MRAs: Areas of male disadvantage (health, work deaths, etc) are 74 not the fault of women, but of toxic, narrow models of manhood #HackLive @MichaelGLFlood: Men’s rights (#MRAs) & fathers’ rights groups are harmful for men 65 themselves. Neglect real male pain, wrongly blame women and feminism, etc

Fig. 1. Top 10 most retweeted tweets in the 20-23 June 2017 sample.

Tweets during the broadcast continued the arguments and critical media commentary described above, and reacted to key moments during the programme. Snarky and ironic commentary was also prevalent, beginning with many users in the #HackLive hashtag humorously wondering why they were willing to suffer through Hack Live. The sizeable presence of social news actors was evident early in the broadcast. At 9:35pm, the most visible tweet in the 20-23 June sample – with 219 retweets

8 and over 770 likes – was posted. This came from @wine_mum_, a popular Twitter account that, before its suspension in late 2017, had over 1,350 followers. The former user of the @wine_mum_ account also has personal friendships with writers from Pedestrian.tv. The tweet responded to an

MRA panellist’s claim that men are afraid to attend MRA meetings: @wine_mum_ claimed that women “are afraid to walk down the street” (Beautiful Nik, 20 June 2017a). Soon after, at 9:41pm,

BuzzFeedOz editor-at-large Jenna Guillaume posted a GIF from popular US sitcom Parks &

Recreation. In the GIF, the main character Leslie Knope – a public servant with political aspirations – tells an off-camera MRA group at a campaign rally “you’re ridiculous and men’s rights is nothing”.

Knope, and the actor who plays her, Amy Poehler, are major feminist figures in contemporary

Western pop-culture (Taylor, 2016). Guillaume’s tweet was captioned “How I feel about #HackLive”, reflecting the popular sentiment described above, and by being the third most visible tweet in the sample, boasting 113 retweets and over 400 likes (20 June 2017a), demonstrated the visibility of the use of pop-culture GIFs in political argumentation (Miltner & Highfield, 2017).

As the broadcast continued, tweets engaged with the panellists’ arguments, such as rebutting comments made by MRAs, or criticising or abusing the panellist Clementine Ford, a feminist writer and activist. They also played ironically with the sporting match angle that the programme had promoted: @wine_mum_ posted “FUCK EM UP @clementine_ford” when Ford rose to respond to an MRA (Beautiful Nik, 20 June 2017b). This semi-satirical commentary continued into more overt criticism. In response to comments made by Ford about white privilege, some tweets criticised the panel’s overwhelming whiteness – the single non-white panellist being sportsperson Joe Williams, who was only briefly called upon to give an ‘Indigenous’ perspective.

Tweets continued to react to key moments in Hack Live. These included when trans panellist Nevo

Zisin discussed their different experiences of female and male presenting, and when academic

Michael Flood was called from the audience to discuss his research on MRAs. Flood argued that the men’s issues on the MRA agenda actually stem from a toxic masculinity, and that MRAs use feminism as a scapegoat. Another popular moment – the most heated conflict in the broadcast, and one most like the predicted ‘sh!tshow’ – was an argument between Ford and panellist and

9 conservative columnist Daisy Cousens. Zisin’s comments towards the end of the programme, where they criticised the mostly white, cisgender, and heteronormative composition of the panel, and criticised the programme’s premise and the questions being discussed as “derailing” real progress also provoked significant Twitter activity. Guillaume continued to have significant presence, with a tweet of hers quoting Ford – “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a million boys, asking them to be better”, accompanied by a GIF of celebrities Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez enthusiastically applauding at the Oscars – receiving 23 retweets and over 130 likes (20 June 2017b).

Post-Broadcast

Immediately following the broadcast, many tweets parodied Hack Live by sarcastically predicting future debates, such as “slavery: good or bad?” (Valentine, 20 June 2017). This latter tweet from comedy writer Lucy Valentine, who hosts the Boonta Vista Socialist Club podcast with Pedestrian.tv writer Ben McLeay, was retweeted over 75 times. Continuing to demonstrate the significant presence of BuzzFeedOz, a tweet – which failed to include the #HackLive hashtag – from reporter Gina

Rushton, posted at 10:41pm, received over 100 retweets and 400 likes (20 June 2017). The tweet, which consisted of an image of Tilley raising an eyebrow in an exaggerated fashion with the caption

“tfw [the feel when] u realise your male privilege allows you to be a c00l contrarian without scary real life repercussions”, commented on how ‘debates’ on privilege are frequently conducted by those with privilege. Rushton’s tweet further demonstrated the popularity of memes as both snarky humour and social critique by reworking a popular meme format to weave complex commentary on Hack Live.

Tweet volume in #HackLive had at this point declined considerably, and the first recap articles were being published. At 11:00pm, Marie Claire Australia, a news, culture, fashion, and beauty outlet, posted their article on Hack Live, headlined “The Internet Is Losing Its Mind Over the ‘Is Male

Privilege Bullsh!t?’ Debate”. Echoing the Twitter commentary, the panel’s discussions were described as “heated – and only at times intelligent”. The article explicitly supported the feminist panellists – with Ford described as a “voice of reason” who shut down “misused statistics about violence against men”. Quoting Hamad’s piece, it stated that “there really is no ‘debate’ to be had

10 over the existence of male privilege” and concluded by embedding a number of tweets about the broadcast, all critical of the MRAs (“The Internet Is Losing Its Mind”, 2017). This style – informal with an explicit perspective, embedding tweets and combining humour in its reportage of high consequential issues like sexism and misogyny – was to be characteristic of the upcoming social news articles on Hack Live.

The first Pedestrian.tv article on Hack Live was posted at 11:25pm. Headlined “MRA Doco Director

Drops Out of ‘Hack Live’ Fearing a Repeat of ‘The Project’”, it was largely a report on how a MRA panellist pulled out of the programme immediately prior to the broadcast. However, it also contained a dry commentary on both the absurd and problematic nature of Hack Live (McLeay, 2017). Author

Ben McLeay wrote informally, occasionally evoking the first-person voice, and directly addressed the reader with a “you” that presupposed an audience that shared the same politics as McLeay. Sharing the sentiment of earlier tweets, the article began with a sarcastic comment stating if “you” wanted to watch something that made “you” so “infuriated” that “you” would “rip out your own hair”, and “you didn't watch Hack Live”, then “you really played yourself”. This was followed by an embedded GIF of DJ Khaled – a US hip-hop producer whose bizarre social media antics have made him a “living meme’” (Hoby, 2016) – with the caption “congratulations you played yourself”. McLeay also mocked the “smug” Tilley, and the spectacle of watching “informed experts” and “people who got their idea of feminism … from watching 90s bro comedies” be pitted in a supposedly serious ‘debate’.

Social news articles were published in relatively quick succession this next morning. Pedestrian.tv’s second article on Hack Live was posted at 8:23am, titled ‘A Trans Aussie Brought Vital Perspective

To Hack’s Male Privilege Special’ (Adams, 2017). Like the others, it was focused on Zisin, arguing that they brought a viewpoint that “reframed nearly every aspect of the conversation”. It agreed with

Zisin’s comments about Hack Live “derailing” discussions on gender, and claimed that these comments were “echoed” pretty “bloody broadly away from the ABC set”. Three tweets were then presented: two of these mocked the premise of the show, with sarcastic predictions for upcoming

Hack Live shows, while the other tweet applauded Zisin. The tweets performed a similar function to television vox pops (Dekavalla, 2012): to present a (not necessarily representative) snapshot of

‘public’ opinion, and to support the claims made in the article. They were also used to add humour – as a ‘best of’ Twitter – while also giving the sense that the article was itself embedded within these

Twitter conversations.

Junkee posted its first recap to Twitter at 10:07am. Headlined “Hack Live Debated Male Privilege and

People Are Seriously Pissed Off”, it briefly outlined what the writer, Tom Clift, saw as the major talking points, with an emphasis on how “people”, i.e. selected Twitter users, responded (2017). The included tweets were a mixture of snarky and non-humorous responses, and served the same purpose as in the Pedestrian.tv article. This article was also written in a similar fashion: beginning with a sarcastic remark that the programme featured “complex, nuanced discussion” before interrupting this with a “LOL JK”, the latter serving as both a source of a humour and a marker identifying Junkee as a web-native outlet familiar with the vernaculars of popular Internet culture. Clift then stated that “a number of people took issue” with how male privilege “was being framed”, with a selection of embedded tweets performing much of the media criticism in the article.

BuzzFeedOz News posted their recap on Hack Live at 12:11am. Written by Rushton, it was headlined

“Here’s Everything That Happened on Last Night’s TV Show about Male Privilege” (2017). It briefly outlined what it viewed as the key moments, such as when MRAs were “shut down” by Ford, and when Zisin brought their perspective to the panel. The article featured large, bold headers for important points, giving the impression of a rolling social media feed. It ended with another bold header stating that it was a “long night”. Four tweets were embedded into the article, again serving a function similar to their use in the other articles, and also providing the main source of overt humour in the piece.

The next day, at 1:57pm, the official ABC2 account posted what caused the last major spike in the hashtag, and provided a symbolic closure to the social media ritual. The tweet, which was retweeted over 107 times – the fourth most retweeted tweet in the sample – was a short clip of Zisin describing their experiences of male- and female-presenting (22 June 2017). ABC2 wrote that Zisin “brought an

12 interesting perspective to our #HackLive debate”: thus framing Zisin as the winner of the ‘debate’, reflective of the support for Zisin on Twitter and in the social news articles.

Fig. 2: #HackLive activity over 20-23 June

Discussion

The Hack Live social media ritual was not just about male privilege: a major common theme on both

Twitter and in the news articles was journalistic ethics, or more specifically, Hack Live’s apparent disregard for them. In this way, the ritual was like other meta discussions – although not all of these are social media rituals in the strict sense – that have increasingly become a fixture of the contemporary mediasphere. In Australia, issues such as climate change, same-sex marriage, and the status of colonial monuments have been at the centre of national debates on the appropriate conditions for debates: for the first two, in terms of what counts as ‘balanced’ and ‘respectful’ debate, and for the latter, whether graffiti is a legitimate contribution to a debate. Such meta discussions have also occurred elsewhere, perhaps most famously debating the ethics of punching a Nazi, sparked after a white nationalist leader was punched in the head at a rally accompanying the inauguration of US

President Donald Trump in 2017. The Hack Live ritual’s place within this contemporary phenomenon

– making evident the current intense alertness to media framing, particularly on social media, but also the cynical exploitation of ‘debate’ and ‘balance’ by some news and political actors to stall action – was in many ways as notable as the content of the programme itself.

At the same time, there was a significant presence of social news actors within the ritualised Twitter interactions and conversations under analysis, with many crafting popular tweets. Those from

BuzzFeedOz editor-at-large Jenna Guillaume, for example, sparked considerable activity in the ritual timeline. Their influence could largely be due to their already-existent mass Twitter followings:

Guillaume, for instance, has over 17,000 followers, while McLeay has over 40,000. But the skill with which people like Guillaume and others spoke in the vernaculars of these Twitter interactions – snark, sarcasm, common expressions, and pop-culture references through the use of visual media such as

GIFs – also cannot be overlooked. In this same regard, these vernaculars were emulated in the social news articles themselves, frequently displaying a strong sensibility not only for the topics and issues that concerned the feminist side of #HackLive, but also for the linguistic modes and styles through which these were discussed. The significant presence of their writers and other social news colleagues within and around #HackLive points towards the collective influence of these actors, and shows how embedded their form of journalism is within these emerging social media rituals that increasingly are a major part of contemporary public discourse.

The discourse on Twitter was partisan, partially fulfilling Hack Live’s explicit promise of a spectacular “sh!tstorm”. The programme successfully drew upon established social media antagonisms to provoke the kinds of ritualised Twitter combat that accompany other panel shows like

Q&A, although this was also resisted through often ironic Twitter commentary. The social news articles were non-objective in this conflict: they mostly overtly identified with the feminist side of

#HackLive, although BuzzFeedOz News’ article presented a more dispassionate recap. However, this non-objectivity was not the bias of hyper-partisan outlets like the US-based Breitbart, the latter characterised by the use of disinformation and a distortion of facts so as to purposely manipulate social media users for political goals (Benkler et al., 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017). In social news, the intent was for factual commentary. By articulating media critique rather than distilling

14 antagonistic distrust of established news media, social news can thus be considered a positive contribution to democratic discourse on social media. The social news articles were also distinct from

‘opinion’. Opinion represents a category of articles in legacy newspapers (or news websites) where overt perspective is permitted: complementing, by providing a space for different perspectives, but never substituting for the objective news content which continues to be the main output of legacy news outlets (Stonecipher, 1979; Rosenfeld, 2000). This type of news content was not featured in the social news outlets. Moreover, the opinion label works to frame a perspective as a single take amongst many possible others. Indeed, the original function of op-eds in US national newspapers such as The

New York Times was to provide a space for diverse and conflicting insights and perspectives, sometimes at odds with the newspaper’s own editorial stance (Day & Golan, 2005, p. 62). As seen in the Hack Live ritual, the notion that there is an innate value in presenting contrasting perspectives was criticised by the social news actors and articles. For these articles, to be factual was to be free from balance. Social news thus is a significant departure from established news genres and traditional journalistic norms.

Conclusion

In this case study I have shown how social news actors and articles positioned themselves above Hack

Live, using this vantage point to provide a commentary on the programme below. This was a commentary that did not fundamentally disrupt the ‘myth of the mediated centre’ – it was indeed still a critique of news media by news media – but it made framing more visible and contested, thus challenging the notion of an unproblematic objectivity. At the same time, social news actors and articles were deeply embedded in the social media ritual around Hack Live, which itself existed both within and around the male privilege ‘debate’ – at times participating and combatting their antagonists, and at others commenting on the problematic role of news media in the framing of such

‘debates’. Even the established outlet, Mare Claire Australia, whose participation in the ritual was otherwise minimal, adopted the vernaculars of social media rituals when reporting on Hack Live. In such ways, and at least as evidenced by this case study, social news can begin to be understood as a

15 news genre of social media rituals: reporting on, writing for, and native to these emerging digital socio-cultural phenomena.

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