This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Hurcombe, Edward (2019) ’Cloudy with a chance of sh!tstorm’: Examining the role of social news outlets in the hack live: Is male privilege bullsh!t? Social media ritual. In Bruns, A, McNair, B, & Schapals, A K (Eds.) Digitizing democracy (Rout- ledge Studies in Media, Communication, and Politics). Routledge, United States of America, pp. 114-130. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/129064/ c Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. 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If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// www.routledge.com/ Digitizing-Democracy-1st-Edition/ Schapals-Bruns-McNair/ p/ book/ 9781138483446 “Cloudy with a chance of sh!tstorm”: Examining the role of social news outlets in the Hack Live: Is Male Privilege Bullsh!t? social media ritual 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 & 3 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