The Minerals Council’s new coal ad is the latest to attract derision online. But for the resources industry, the mockery may just be collateral damage in the wider mission to reach out to its supporters.
Rupert Murdoch is nothing if not a prolific tweeter.
Reuters/Lucy Nicholson
Why would a man with so much media power at his fingertips, and political power on three continents to match, choose to expose himself to the raw landscape of the Twittersphere?
Does the media’s coverage of events such as the Sydney Lindt cafe siege deserve more scrutiny?
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Public engagement of academics has increased enormously in recent decades. But this new level of engagement is producing problems and conflicts for which many academics are ill-prepared.
China’s mourning over the Tianjin disaster has taken place both online and off.
Kim Kyung Hoon/Reuters
Social media is rewriting patterns of communication in China.
Dire predictions on the future of children’s brains are shocking, not least because of how flimsy the evidence is to support these views.
zeitfaenger.at/Flickr
Baseless claims about the damage done to kids’ development create needless panic. And they distract from legitimate, evidence-based concerns with which parents need to engage.
Ken Kendricks Jr puts his hands together in prayer at a makeshift memorial to Michael Brown on August 22 2014.
Adrees Latif/REUTERS
A movement grew out of Michael Brown’s death one year ago. The people in #BlackLivesMatter want us to fully witness violence against black youth. Their tools are cell phones and social media.
Angry messages taped up outside Palmer’s dental office were repeated thousands of times online.
Eric Miller/Reuters
Shouting past each other via different kinds of media isn’t going to help researchers – from éminences grises to new postdocs – effectively work together on issues in the field of science.
We need political and civil society leaders to reflect on the language that they use, and to strive to shape a civic narrative with which we can all engage.
Jim Carrey might mean well, but his Twitter rants against vaccines only make him look dumb.
EPA/Erik S. Lesser
Jim Carrey’s anti-vaccination tweets employ a number of techniques used by anti-science cranks. By understanding them, we can shield ourselves from well-intentioned but ill-informed voices.
Joe Hockey’s successful defamation case against Fairfax Media raises questions about the extent to which politicians should be able to sue in relation to publications about their public conduct.
AAP/Dan Himbrechts
Hockey v Fairfax illustrates that recent legal and technological developments still pose challenges for defamation law, which has not been reformed to keep pace with these changes.