Project Summary Report: The Social Media & Employment Project
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have revolutionised social lives and have had a big impact on how we connect, learn, remember, and even how we work and find jobs. For young people who have grown up using social media, the digital traces of life generated through social media use can also represent important personal histories. However, as young people move into professional lives, their past disclosures can, for better or worse, be resurfaced. What one says and does on the internet can persist, potentially having a negative impact on young people’s futures.
This report looks at how young Australians use social media, how they represent themselves on social media when preparing for employment, and how employers use social media for making employment decisions.
This report also includes short two-page guides for parents, teachers, and young people themselves on how to best prepare social media for employment futures.
Publications arising from the Fellowship
Growing up on Facebook
Based on data collected in a previous study with Sian Lincoln, but finished in the early parts of this DECRA fellowship, 'Growing up on Facebook' sets out the ground-work for many of the key ideas and issues that will be covered in this Social Media & Employment Project.
Summary: Growing up in the era of social media isn’t easy. With Facebook now having existed for more than a decade and a half, young people who have grown up using social media can look back and see earlier versions of themselves staring back: nostalgic moments with friends from school, reminders of painful breakups, birthdays and graduations, posts that allude to drama with family, experiences of travel, and blurry drunken photos. How do we make sense of our own personal histories inscribed on and through social media? What are the implications for future careers, for public trust in social media companies, and for our own memories? Growing up on Facebook examines the role of Facebook, and other social media platforms that have emerged around Facebook, in mediating experiences of 'growing up' for young people. Based on interviews with the first generation of young people to grow up with social media, the book covers education and employment, love and relationships, family life, and leisure (drinking, travel, and music). It touches on processes of impression management, privacy, context collapse, and control, and raises critical questions about the standards we hold social media platforms to, as they become the guardians of our personal histories. The book will appeal to both academic and general audiences alike. Students and scholars in media and communications, the sociology of youth, and beyond, will find strong connections to the literature and acknowledgement of the methodological detail of the study the book is based on. The themes and issues covered in the book are also of broader interest, and will appeal to people who have themselves grown up in the era of social media, to parents, educators, anyone interested in how we look back at social media as a personal memory archive.
Guiding young people’s social media use in school policies: opportunities, risks, moral panics, and imagined futures
Young people’s social media use has long been scrutinised, contested, and the subject of sustained moral panics. Schools play an important role in socialising young people into specific forms of social media use, both in and out of the classroom. In this paper we examine 38 secondary school (‘high school’) policies that seek to govern how social media is used by students in Australia. We examine the themes and issues covered, and the broader discursive construction of social media within these documents. Our analysis reveals both opportunities and risks identified within these documents: from opportunities like social connection, self-expression, citizenship, and ‘digital skills’ through to an extensive focus on supposed ‘risks’ including sexting and child pornography, the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, mental health concerns, teacher-student relationships, and broad concerns about privacy and the persistence of digital disclosures. Narratives about young people’s imagined futures also emerge in these policy documents, centred on risk and proactive reputation management (for schools and individual students), pointing to a hidden curriculum of surveillance where reputational damage is linked to irreversable harm to professional and personal futures.
“How a Facebook Update Can Cost You Your Job”: News Coverage of Employment Terminations Following Social Media Disclosures, From Racist Cops to Queer Teachers
Social media posts and profiles have become a key part of hiring and firing processes, producing a “hidden curriculum of surveillance.” When hiring, employers routinely engage in “cybervetting” job candidates, making judgments based on their social media presence (or absence), and so too can social media disclosures impact (positively and negatively) employment progression and even result in termination. Where is the line between personal social media use and professional identities? What is the difference between holding people in positions of power to account and invading the privacy of everyday people? What kinds of social media posts get people fired? In this article, we report on a study of 312 news media articles that document stories of people being fired because of a social media post. We divide the corpus into posts made by the individuals who are fired (“self-posts,” n = 264) and posts made by others that resulted in the subject of those posts losing their job (“third party,” n = 48). Racism was the most common reason people were fired in these news stories, followed by other forms of discriminatory behavior (such as queerphobia), offensive content, workplace conflict, political content, acts of violence, and abuse. We examine these narratives through the lens of what van Dijck describes as “professional value,” and ultimately seek to question how these stories normalize the “hidden curriculum of surveillance,” putting additional pressure on employees and young people who are called to act on social media through the prism of future employment.
Who really gets fired over social media posts? We studied hundreds of cases to find out
What you say and do on social media can affect your employment; it can prevent you from getting hired, stall career progression and may even get you fired. Is this fair – or an invasion of privacy? We looked at 312 news articles about people who had been fired because of a social media post.
Young adults' experiences with Australian public services: final report
In 2020, Monash University and the Australian Catholic University partnered with the Australian Public Service Reform Office in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to research young Australians' perceptions about and experiences with public services. Enabled through Robards' DECRA Fellowship, Robards and Prof Steven Roberts co-directed the project with Ben Lyall (Project Manager), and Investgators Barbara Barbosa Neves, Zareh Ghazarian, Jonathan Smith, Jacqueline Laughland-Booy, Verity Trotty, and Jo Lindsay. We were supported by a team of Research Assistants including Chiara De Lazzari, Madeleine Ulbrick, Sarah Hewitt, Patrick Marple, William Lukamto, and Callum Jones.
Our work engaged with almost 3,000 young people through surveys and focus groups, and was supported by secondary data sources from surveys and social media. The report also featured in the development of Australia’s Youth Policy Framework (2020). This report presents the findings of a large-scale, mixed-methods study of youth transitions in Australia, with a particular focus on young people's experiences with public services.
A Citizen Science Approach to Monitoring Unhealthy Industry Digital Marketing to Young People
Also undertaken during Robards' DECRA Fellowship, this project was co-directed with Nic Carah (UQ) and in partnership with VicHealth to studen how young people saw and experienced unhealthy advertising on social media.
In this project we worked with 204 young Victorians to examine the promotion of alcohol, unhealthy food, sugary drinks, and gambling on social media. Our “citizen scientist” participants worked with us to collect 5,169 examples of advertising they saw on their own social media feeds over a two-week period. In addition to the collection of visual data, citizen scientists completed two surveys on their views and perceptions of unhealthy marketing on social media before and after the collection of screenshots, and were invited to download and share information Facebook created about them in its advertising model. They also offered insights and self-reflections on the data they were collecting via online chat and discussion forums.
This research establishes a considerable body of evidence of unhealthy marketing through digital channels, co-analysed with young people themselves. The evidence presented here can inform the development of monitoring and regulation of digital marketing by harmful industries. The project has also drawn attention to and developed young Victorians’ critical literacies related to digital marketing by harmful industries. Our citizen science approach has enabled the active involvement of research participants in the data collection and analysis of findings, and engaged young people as advocates for change in the governance and accountability of marketers and digital platforms that cause harm and evade accountability.
Project Summary Report: The Social Media & Employment Project
“How a Facebook Update Can Cost You Your Job”: News Coverage of Employment Terminations Following Social Media Disclosures, From Racist Cops to Queer Teachers
