Battlelines of Accountability: The Discursive Production of Digital Responsibility

Abstract Public inquiries have become pivotal arenas in which the ethical responsibilities of digital platforms are publicly constructed and contested. Yet scholarship has paid limited attention to the linguistic mechanisms through which these contests unfold. This paper examines the 2024 Australian Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society as a high-stakes moral forum in which technology firms, regulators, and civil society actors engage in discursive struggles over adolesce