Nicolas Suzor
Biographic Data
| ID | 351971 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nicolas Suzor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nicolas |
| FAMILY NAME | Suzor |
| SIGNATURE | SUZOR N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queensland University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3029-0646 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Video-on-demand affordability
This article considers how content fragmentation in online video-on-demand (VOD) markets shapes public access to, and affordability of, screen content. We offer a case study of Australia, a jurisdiction in which media and broadcast policy have traditionally prioritised some considerations of access and reach over commercial interests in exclusivity and market segmentation. To capture the affordability of screen content, we use a shopping basket a…
Measuring Misogyny
Over the past decade, social media companies have come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for women. While they have made some changes to their policies and design, their foundational approach to content moderation has remained largely the same. Platforms continue to focus on identifying, assessing and responding to individual pieces of violating content, like overt hate speech, direct threats, and doxxing. This approach is i…
Gpt4 v the Oversight Board
Large-scale automated content moderation on major social media platforms continues to be highly controversial. Moderation and curation are central to the value propositions that platforms provide, but companies have struggled to convincingly demonstrate that their automated systems are fair and effective. For a long time, the limitations of automated content classifiers in dealing with borderline cases have seemed intractable. With the recent exp…
Contesting the public interest in AI governance
This article argues that public contestability is a critical attribute of governance arrangements designed to align AI deployment with the public interest. Mechanisms to collectively contest decisions which do not track public interests are an important guardrail against erroneous, exclusionary, and arbitrary decision-making. On that basis, we suggest that efforts to align AI to the public interest through democratic participation will benefit su…
Everyday Misogyny
This paper examines the manifestation of 'everyday' online misogyny. Social media platforms are often deeply unsafe spaces for women, particularly women who speak publicly about feminist issues. In response to a number of public controversies over the last decade, platforms have introduced a range of different design interventions and policy changes. However, these interventions have predominantly focused on the most extreme, unambiguous manifest…
Incels on Reddit
This paper examines the challenges of combating misogyny and harmful social norms on the social networking and news site Reddit. Reddit has a long history of hosting racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise harmful communities. Incels — an Internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs — flourished on Reddit before several major subreddits were progressively banned. In this paper, we examine four incel subreddits to under…
Incels on Reddit
The social news website Reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (Gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (Topinka 2017), and violence against women (Massanari 2017). As a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators to self-govern the subreddits (Matias 2016), Reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (Gillespie 2018). Incel…
What’s ‘Up Next’? Investigating Algorithmic Recommendations on Youtube Across Issues and Over Time
YouTube’s ‘up next’ feature algorithmically suggests videos to watch after a video that is currently playing. This feature has been criticised for limiting users’ exposure to diverse media content and information sources; meanwhile, YouTube has reported that they have implemented technical and policy changes to address these concerns. Yet, there is limited data to support either the existing concerns or YouTube’s claims. Drawing on the concept of…
What’s “Up Next”? Investigating Algorithmic Recommendations on YouTube Across Issues and Over Time
YouTube’s “up next” feature algorithmically selects, suggests, and displays videos to watch after the one that is currently playing. This feature has been criticized for limiting users’ exposure to a range of diverse media content and information sources; meanwhile, YouTube has reported that they have implemented various technical and policy changes to address these concerns. However, there is little publicly available data to support either the …
Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine
Leaked documents, press coverage, and user protests have increasingly drawn attention to social media platforms’ seemingly contradictory governance practices. We investigate the governance approaches of Tinder, Instagram, and Vine through detailed analyses of each platform, using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2016 The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society 20(3).), as well as interviews w…
Playing with machines
This article presents the results of methodological experimentation that utilises machine learning to investigate automated copyright enforcement on YouTube. Using a dataset of 76.7 million YouTube videos, we explore how digital and computational methods can be leveraged to better understand content moderation and copyright enforcement at a large scale.We used the BERT language model to train a machine learning classifier to identify videos in ca…
Making Media
Lawless
Rampant abuse, hate speech, censorship, bias, and disinformation - our Internet has problems. It is governed by technology companies - search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructure providers - whose hidden rules influence what we are allowed to see and say. In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor presents gripping examples of exactly how tech companies govern our digital environment and how they bend to pressure from governments and other power…
Internet regulation as media policy
This article identifies the current global ‘techlash’ towards the major digital and social media platforms as providing the context for a renewed debate about whether these digital platform companies are effectively media companies (publishers and broadcasters of media content), and implications this has for twenty-first-century media policy. It identifies content moderation as a critical site around which such debates are being played out, and c…
The Rule of Law on Instagram
This article uses innovative digital research methods to evaluate the moderation of images that depict women’s bodies on Instagram against the Western legal ideal of the rule of law. Specifically, this article focuses on the contested rule of law values of formal equality, certainty, reason giving, transparency, participation and accountability. Female forms are the focal point for our investigation due to widespread concerns that the platform is…
Evaluating the legitimacy of platform governance
This article provides an overview of the key values that we argue should underpin an index of the legitimacy of the governance of online intermediaries. The aim is ultimately to allow scholars to rank the policies and practices of intermediaries against core human rights values and principles of legitimate governance in a way that enables comparison across different intermediaries and over time. This work builds on the efforts of a broad range of…
The limits of (digital) constitutionalism
This article explores the challenges of digital constitutionalism in practice through a case study examining how concepts of privacy and security have been framed and contested in Australian cyber security and telecommunications policy-making over the last decade. The Australian Government has formally committed to ‘internet freedom’ norms, including privacy, through membership of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC). Importantly, however, this com…
Technology facilitated coercive control
This article describes domestic violence as a key context of online misogyny, foregrounding the role of digital media in mediating, coordinating, and regulating it; and proposing an agenda for future research. Scholars and anti-violence advocates have documented the ways digital media exacerbate existing patterns of gendered violence and introduce new modes of abuse, a trend highlighted by this special issue. We propose the term “technology facil…
Calculating the consequences of narrow Australian copyright exceptions
Digital Constitutionalism
Platforms govern users, and the way that platforms govern matters. In this article, I propose that the legitimacy of governance of users by platforms should be evaluated against the values of the rule of law. In particular, I suggest that we should care deeply about the extent to which private governance is consensual, transparent, equally applied and relatively stable, and fairly enforced. These are the core values of good governance, but are al…
Scum of the Earth
2.68] ('Contempt Discussion Paper'); New Zealand Law Commission, Juries in Criminal Trials, Report No 69 (2001) 47.As early as 1979, Brennan, McGregor and Lockhart JJ commented that '[i]t is wrong to assume that jurors do not have or will not exercise a critical judgement of what they see, read or hear in the media': Duff v The Queen (1979) 39 FLR 315, 333.7 Chesterman, Chan and Hampton, above n 6, 80-7.In 32 out of 34 trials that attracted in-tr…
The paradigm shift in realising the right to read
Millions of people with print disabilities are denied the right to read. While some important efforts have been made to convert standard books to accessible formats and create accessible repositories, these have so far only addressed this crisis in an ad hoc way. This article argues that universally designed ebook libraries have the potential of substantially enabling persons with print disabilities. As a case study of what is possible, we analys…
Evaluating Consent and Legitimacy Amongst Shifting Community Norms
The legitimate resolution of disputes in online environments requires a complex understanding of the social norms of the community. The conventional legal approach to resolving disputes through literal interpretation of the contractual terms of service is highly problematic because it does not take into account potential conflict with community expectations. In this paper we examine the importance of consent to community governance and argue that…
On the (Partially) Inalienable Rights of Participants in Virtual Communities
As virtual communities become more central to the everyday activities of connected individuals, we face increasingly pressing questions about the proper allocation of power, rights and responsibilities. This paper argues that our current legal discourse is ill-equipped to provide answers that will safeguard the legitimate interests of participants and simultaneously refrain from limiting the future innovative development of these spaces. From soc…
Fan-Based Production for Computer Games
Fan-based or third party content creation has assumed an integral place in the multi-million dollar computer games industry. The emerging production ecology that involves new kinds of distributed organisations and ad hoc networks epitomises the 'drift of value' from producer to consumer and allows us to understand how user-led innovation influences the creative industries. But the ability to control intellectual property rights in content product…
Technology facilitated coercive control
This article describes domestic violence as a key context of online misogyny, foregrounding the role of digital media in mediating, coordinating, and regulating it; and proposing an agenda for future research. Scholars and anti-violence advocates have documented the ways digital media exacerbate existing patterns of gendered violence and introduce new modes of abuse, a trend highlighted by this special issue. We propose the term “technology facil…
Internet regulation as media policy
This article identifies the current global ‘techlash’ towards the major digital and social media platforms as providing the context for a renewed debate about whether these digital platform companies are effectively media companies (publishers and broadcasters of media content), and implications this has for twenty-first-century media policy. It identifies content moderation as a critical site around which such debates are being played out, and c…
Digital Constitutionalism
Platforms govern users, and the way that platforms govern matters. In this article, I propose that the legitimacy of governance of users by platforms should be evaluated against the values of the rule of law. In particular, I suggest that we should care deeply about the extent to which private governance is consensual, transparent, equally applied and relatively stable, and fairly enforced. These are the core values of good governance, but are al…
The Rule of Law on Instagram
This article uses innovative digital research methods to evaluate the moderation of images that depict women’s bodies on Instagram against the Western legal ideal of the rule of law. Specifically, this article focuses on the contested rule of law values of formal equality, certainty, reason giving, transparency, participation and accountability. Female forms are the focal point for our investigation due to widespread concerns that the platform is…
Playing with machines
This article presents the results of methodological experimentation that utilises machine learning to investigate automated copyright enforcement on YouTube. Using a dataset of 76.7 million YouTube videos, we explore how digital and computational methods can be leveraged to better understand content moderation and copyright enforcement at a large scale.We used the BERT language model to train a machine learning classifier to identify videos in ca…
Fan-Based Production for Computer Games
Fan-based or third party content creation has assumed an integral place in the multi-million dollar computer games industry. The emerging production ecology that involves new kinds of distributed organisations and ad hoc networks epitomises the 'drift of value' from producer to consumer and allows us to understand how user-led innovation influences the creative industries. But the ability to control intellectual property rights in content product…
Calculating the consequences of narrow Australian copyright exceptions
Scum of the Earth
2.68] ('Contempt Discussion Paper'); New Zealand Law Commission, Juries in Criminal Trials, Report No 69 (2001) 47.As early as 1979, Brennan, McGregor and Lockhart JJ commented that '[i]t is wrong to assume that jurors do not have or will not exercise a critical judgement of what they see, read or hear in the media': Duff v The Queen (1979) 39 FLR 315, 333.7 Chesterman, Chan and Hampton, above n 6, 80-7.In 32 out of 34 trials that attracted in-tr…
Fan-Based Production for Computer Games
Fan-based or third party content creation has assumed an integral place in the multi-million dollar computer games industry. The emerging production ecology that involves new kinds of distributed organisations and ad hoc networks epitomises the 'drift of value' from producer to consumer and allows us to understand how user-led innovation influences the creative industries. But the ability to control intellectual property rights in content product…
On the (Partially) Inalienable Rights of Participants in Virtual Communities
As virtual communities become more central to the everyday activities of connected individuals, we face increasingly pressing questions about the proper allocation of power, rights and responsibilities. This paper argues that our current legal discourse is ill-equipped to provide answers that will safeguard the legitimate interests of participants and simultaneously refrain from limiting the future innovative development of these spaces. From soc…
Evaluating Consent and Legitimacy Amongst Shifting Community Norms
The legitimate resolution of disputes in online environments requires a complex understanding of the social norms of the community. The conventional legal approach to resolving disputes through literal interpretation of the contractual terms of service is highly problematic because it does not take into account potential conflict with community expectations. In this paper we examine the importance of consent to community governance and argue that…
The paradigm shift in realising the right to read
Millions of people with print disabilities are denied the right to read. While some important efforts have been made to convert standard books to accessible formats and create accessible repositories, these have so far only addressed this crisis in an ad hoc way. This article argues that universally designed ebook libraries have the potential of substantially enabling persons with print disabilities. As a case study of what is possible, we analys…
Scum of the Earth
2.68] ('Contempt Discussion Paper'); New Zealand Law Commission, Juries in Criminal Trials, Report No 69 (2001) 47.As early as 1979, Brennan, McGregor and Lockhart JJ commented that '[i]t is wrong to assume that jurors do not have or will not exercise a critical judgement of what they see, read or hear in the media': Duff v The Queen (1979) 39 FLR 315, 333.7 Chesterman, Chan and Hampton, above n 6, 80-7.In 32 out of 34 trials that attracted in-tr…
Evaluating the legitimacy of platform governance
This article provides an overview of the key values that we argue should underpin an index of the legitimacy of the governance of online intermediaries. The aim is ultimately to allow scholars to rank the policies and practices of intermediaries against core human rights values and principles of legitimate governance in a way that enables comparison across different intermediaries and over time. This work builds on the efforts of a broad range of…
The limits of (digital) constitutionalism
This article explores the challenges of digital constitutionalism in practice through a case study examining how concepts of privacy and security have been framed and contested in Australian cyber security and telecommunications policy-making over the last decade. The Australian Government has formally committed to ‘internet freedom’ norms, including privacy, through membership of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC). Importantly, however, this com…
Technology facilitated coercive control
This article describes domestic violence as a key context of online misogyny, foregrounding the role of digital media in mediating, coordinating, and regulating it; and proposing an agenda for future research. Scholars and anti-violence advocates have documented the ways digital media exacerbate existing patterns of gendered violence and introduce new modes of abuse, a trend highlighted by this special issue. We propose the term “technology facil…
Calculating the consequences of narrow Australian copyright exceptions
Digital Constitutionalism
Platforms govern users, and the way that platforms govern matters. In this article, I propose that the legitimacy of governance of users by platforms should be evaluated against the values of the rule of law. In particular, I suggest that we should care deeply about the extent to which private governance is consensual, transparent, equally applied and relatively stable, and fairly enforced. These are the core values of good governance, but are al…
Making Media
Lawless
Rampant abuse, hate speech, censorship, bias, and disinformation - our Internet has problems. It is governed by technology companies - search engines, social media platforms, and infrastructure providers - whose hidden rules influence what we are allowed to see and say. In Lawless, Nicolas P. Suzor presents gripping examples of exactly how tech companies govern our digital environment and how they bend to pressure from governments and other power…
Internet regulation as media policy
This article identifies the current global ‘techlash’ towards the major digital and social media platforms as providing the context for a renewed debate about whether these digital platform companies are effectively media companies (publishers and broadcasters of media content), and implications this has for twenty-first-century media policy. It identifies content moderation as a critical site around which such debates are being played out, and c…
The Rule of Law on Instagram
This article uses innovative digital research methods to evaluate the moderation of images that depict women’s bodies on Instagram against the Western legal ideal of the rule of law. Specifically, this article focuses on the contested rule of law values of formal equality, certainty, reason giving, transparency, participation and accountability. Female forms are the focal point for our investigation due to widespread concerns that the platform is…
Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine
Leaked documents, press coverage, and user protests have increasingly drawn attention to social media platforms’ seemingly contradictory governance practices. We investigate the governance approaches of Tinder, Instagram, and Vine through detailed analyses of each platform, using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2016 The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society 20(3).), as well as interviews w…
Playing with machines
This article presents the results of methodological experimentation that utilises machine learning to investigate automated copyright enforcement on YouTube. Using a dataset of 76.7 million YouTube videos, we explore how digital and computational methods can be leveraged to better understand content moderation and copyright enforcement at a large scale.We used the BERT language model to train a machine learning classifier to identify videos in ca…
Incels on Reddit
The social news website Reddit has a long history of hosting communities (‘subreddits’) that advocate or encourage white supremacy (Gillespie 2018), disparagement of minority groups (Topinka 2017), and violence against women (Massanari 2017). As a platform that relies heavily on volunteer moderators to self-govern the subreddits (Matias 2016), Reddit has been criticised for failing to adequately enforce its site-wide rules (Gillespie 2018). Incel…
What’s ‘Up Next’? Investigating Algorithmic Recommendations on Youtube Across Issues and Over Time
YouTube’s ‘up next’ feature algorithmically suggests videos to watch after a video that is currently playing. This feature has been criticised for limiting users’ exposure to diverse media content and information sources; meanwhile, YouTube has reported that they have implemented technical and policy changes to address these concerns. Yet, there is limited data to support either the existing concerns or YouTube’s claims. Drawing on the concept of…
What’s “Up Next”? Investigating Algorithmic Recommendations on YouTube Across Issues and Over Time
YouTube’s “up next” feature algorithmically selects, suggests, and displays videos to watch after the one that is currently playing. This feature has been criticized for limiting users’ exposure to a range of diverse media content and information sources; meanwhile, YouTube has reported that they have implemented various technical and policy changes to address these concerns. However, there is little publicly available data to support either the …
Incels on Reddit
This paper examines the challenges of combating misogyny and harmful social norms on the social networking and news site Reddit. Reddit has a long history of hosting racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and otherwise harmful communities. Incels — an Internet subculture that ascribes to deeply misogynistic beliefs — flourished on Reddit before several major subreddits were progressively banned. In this paper, we examine four incel subreddits to under…
Everyday Misogyny
This paper examines the manifestation of 'everyday' online misogyny. Social media platforms are often deeply unsafe spaces for women, particularly women who speak publicly about feminist issues. In response to a number of public controversies over the last decade, platforms have introduced a range of different design interventions and policy changes. However, these interventions have predominantly focused on the most extreme, unambiguous manifest…
Contesting the public interest in AI governance
This article argues that public contestability is a critical attribute of governance arrangements designed to align AI deployment with the public interest. Mechanisms to collectively contest decisions which do not track public interests are an important guardrail against erroneous, exclusionary, and arbitrary decision-making. On that basis, we suggest that efforts to align AI to the public interest through democratic participation will benefit su…
Measuring Misogyny
Over the past decade, social media companies have come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for women. While they have made some changes to their policies and design, their foundational approach to content moderation has remained largely the same. Platforms continue to focus on identifying, assessing and responding to individual pieces of violating content, like overt hate speech, direct threats, and doxxing. This approach is i…
Gpt4 v the Oversight Board
Large-scale automated content moderation on major social media platforms continues to be highly controversial. Moderation and curation are central to the value propositions that platforms provide, but companies have struggled to convincingly demonstrate that their automated systems are fair and effective. For a long time, the limitations of automated content classifiers in dealing with borderline cases have seemed intractable. With the recent exp…
Video-on-demand affordability
This article considers how content fragmentation in online video-on-demand (VOD) markets shapes public access to, and affordability of, screen content. We offer a case study of Australia, a jurisdiction in which media and broadcast policy have traditionally prioritised some considerations of access and reach over commercial interests in exclusivity and market segmentation. To capture the affordability of screen content, we use a shopping basket a…
Political science (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Business (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection (12 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Social media (9 works) · Internet privacy (7 works)