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Robo-Call Usage by Australian Political Parties: The Case of the Spooky Vote-Hunting Robot

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posted on 2023-05-18, 02:28 authored by Kefford, G
While internationally, pre-recorded telephone messages, often referred to as robo-calls, have been used for some time, their use during Australian election campaigns goes back less than a decade. This article tracks the emergence of robo-calls and a complementary technology known as telephone ‘town-halling’ in Australia. It explores the way Australian parties are using telephonic technology as part of their election campaigns and compares this use to the experience in the United States and Canada. While these countries have seen a push for increased robo-call and telephonic regulation as a result of a number of controversies, this article argues that any regulatory changes in Australia should reflect the different way the technology is being used here. In particular, the evidence shows that it is the telephone ‘town-hall’ technology which is set to grow most significantly and regulatory changes need to reflect the distinction between the two forms of telephonic political campaigning.

History

Publication title

Communication, Politics and Culture

Volume

47

Pagination

1-16

ISSN

1836-0645

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

R M I T * School of Media & Communication

Place of publication

Australia

Rights statement

Licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Government and politics not elsewhere classified

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