Settler-Australian anxieties and the savagery of Facebook: notes from Alice Springs

In an age when social media is fully embedded within the human experience and identity, it also offers up opportunities for the re-enactment of dispossession and the development of stigma. In this article, I examine data from the remote Central Australian town of Alice Springs' social media forums, describing a novel medium via which ongoing moral violence is levelled at young Aboriginal people. Settler constructions of Aboriginality are examined in some detail, along with their implications for the town’s settler and Aboriginal communities. I argue that posts from these pages are not only symptomatic of historical violence and dispossession, but that they are also manifestations of violence in themselves. In addition, I consider the ways that these processes might contribute to lived experiences of disadvantage for young people, by extending the reach of surveillance and equating to a novel form of moral violence, as defined by Didier Fassin.