Sebastien Fassiaux successfully defended his PhD thesis @upf.edu "Preserving Consumer Autonomy through the EU Regulation of Artificial Intelligence-Driven Marketing", and the jury (including myself) was very excited about his DSA/conpro/competition law angle!

New issue dropped! Thanks to @sarahvahed.bsky.social @cgoanta.bsky.social @koenvanzon.bsky.social @whommes.bsky.social @historikarin.bsky.social @whommes.bsky.social @lolaavril.bsky.social and the others for some brilliant work. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"Hanging with the T-Bros" youtu.be/QWT_A_7Jh9Y?... (Who else than @cgoanta.bsky.social introduced me to T-Bros influencers)

🧶New influencer case in NL: the Court of Gelderland ordered a food influencer to pay back €38,642.01 in welfare benefits (bijstand) received while the influencer was also getting brand deals (mostly barters). uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/details?id=E... 3 important takeaways:

The White House is doing influencer press briefings now and it speaks volume as to why journalists can’t be replaced www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Had a fantastic time at @utrechtuniversity.bsky.social last week. It was great to have discussions on the very timely topic of political influencers with @hannakainen.bsky.social, Johanna Arnesson, @taylorannabell.bsky.social and Romanian streamer Faiãr. Thank you for having us @cgoanta.bsky.social!

I’ve posted a number of threads over the past couple of weeks explaining the framework I’ve developed around disordered discourse and its outcomes. But I also want to explain why that framework is useful, beyond just mapping the problem or explaining how we got here.

@naomiappelman.bsky.social promoveert op het proefschrift: 'Contesting Online Exclusion. #EU-regulation of content moderation through an agonistic lens' op 28 februari. Haar promotoren zijn prof. dr. N. Helberger en prof. @jvh.bsky.social. https://bit.ly/4jYc8i5

When kids become their parents' content on TikTok! 🤳✨ Check out this timely paper by our community members @tomdivon.bsky.social @taylorannabell.bsky.social @cgoanta.bsky.social 👇

X raises its Premium+ subscription to $40 per month, or $395 per year, after raising it to $22 per month in December 2024, following Grok3's launch (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

New publication! 🚨 Together with my brill team (@taylorannabell.bsky.social & @cgoanta.bsky.social), we explore how parents turn kids into commodities on TikTok, diving into the nuances of *kidfluencers* & raising legal questions about platform governance. See🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Trump White House redefines ‘the press’: “Whether you are a TikTok content creator, a blogger, a podcaster … if you are producing legitimate news content, you will be allowed to apply for press credentials to this White House” Seems small, huge ramifications! www.niemanlab.org/2025/01/whit...

Regulation vibe shift: adopting rules to hold predatory practices by highly powerful tech companies accountable is ‘screwing’ with US industry. The Brussels effect had a good run, platform governance will now likely go back to its initial US colonialism. www.politico.eu/article/zuck...

🎉 Our paper "Influencer self-disclosure practices on Instagram: A multi-country longitudinal study" is officially out 🔗 shorturl.at/v2znK Led by @thalesbertaglia.bsky.social w/Adriana Iamnitchi, @cgoanta.bsky.social we analyzed 1M+ Instagram posts (2010–2020) from 400 influencers across 🇺🇸🇧🇷🇳🇱🇩🇪 >>>

Our legal computational paper led by @ThalesBertaglia w @gerasimoss & @2late2matter is out in Online Social Networks & Media! We look at self-disclosure practices by 400 influencers from 4 countries (NL, DE, BR & US) in 1m Instagram posts across 10 years. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

The Romanian Constitutional Court decision in the first of its kind annulment of the presidential elections of 2024 has now been motivated 🧵 s.iw.ro/gateway/g/Zmls…

RO president declassified intelligence reports about the presidential elections. Apart from the expected dimension of Russian interference & bots, TikTok confirmed one account paid €391k to other accounts supporting Calin Georgescu #monetization hotnews.ro/wp-content/upl…

Wow, the e-commerce strategy of TikTok (US) is reaching a whole new level and it's WILD. Here's an example: this influencer is sharing some hair growth tips - no disclosed brand partnerships, no e-commerce features embedded to her content...or so it seems 👀 1/

'EU upcoming Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) introduces significant new legal uncertainties... key technical guidance may not be finalized until (too late). Google will stop serving political advertising in the EU' before Oct'25 blog.google/around-the-g...

The Romanian presidential elections i.a. the fake account networks of the most popular candidate (independent & coming out of nowhere) will be a test of defining systemic risks under art 34(1)(c) of the Digital Services Act (negative effects on elections) www.politico.eu/article/elec...

Who were the biggest anti-Trump #resistance influencers born out of Trump's first presidency? Looking for people who became big on Twitter through posting resistance/anti Trump content.

So it seems there was a candidate behind this campaign and for many other reasons he was most voted in the first round. Very interesting & scary: a rather artificial engagement campaign led to virality that influenced TikTok’s *search bar* and further amplified the candidate 🫠

We tried to analyze the ad ecosystem of TikTok with the data available in February: tiktok-audit.com/blog/2024/ad...

Wrapped up the day with a guest lecture on influencers, social commerce, and consumer protection (Taylor's version) with the WONDERFUL students of @elibietti.bsky.social. Reminded me how much I love teaching and *how much I learn from students* 🫶

Today was truly a special day of my research stay in the US 💫 I had such a blast presenting my draft article on the regulation of e-commerce on social media under the DSA at @nusl.bsky.social. Forever grateful to @elibietti.bsky.social & @lexlanham.bsky.social for making it happen!

Regulators around the world

Curious about how a basic political influencer campaign looks like? I scraped TikTok and analyzed 40 videos made for the upcoming Romanian presidential elections. humanads.eu/influencers-...

Disclosing branded content is seen as mainly an influencer problem, but not enough attention is paid to the platform mediation of disclosures. In this new paper with amazing @taylorannabell.bsky.social & @laade.bsky.social, we focus on what platforms say they do/do with branded content.

Our publication on the disclosure practices of influencers from a platform perspective has been published in the @PolicyR and available open access! This type of collaboration is truly the reason why I love interdisciplinary research so much @TaylorAnnabell @CatalinaGoanta 🫶✨

AI is not always hallucinating… Grok, owned by Musk, concludes: “Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform” fortune.com/2024/11/14/g...

"this is fine" British Library Manuscript - royal ms 20 a ii f3r

The sixth edition of the Natural Legal Language Processing workshop is live on YT! Join the NLP community that was doing impressive research on LLMs before they were cool www.youtube.com/live/tHM__C0...

Ok I guess this time around the Twitter exodus is real

✨With the EU Commission & the HUMANads ERC, in the past 6 months Sophie Bishop (Leeds) & I have been developing the 1st European legal training for influencers/content creators & EU consumer law. We're launching the Influencer Legal Hub on 16 October. Join us! us06web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

What have you done, Jack

Our ERC StG #HUMANads project website is up and fully updated with all our publications, event organization and participation. Can't wait to share even more resources shortly! Have a look if you want to see what kept us busy this past year 👇 https://humanads.eu/

Remember the ChatGPT fake case law? These are ChatGPT fake footnotes in a university admissions essay. When confronted in the interview, the applicant even described one of the "publications" at length to my face, which was impressive yet suitable for a different study (drama)

Thanks to Lindsay Dodgson from Insider for revealing this UGC TikTok scam hurting creators & consumers. UGC contracted via Upwork uses ‘authentic’ stories to scam consumers to buy overpriced jewelry: https://www.insider.com/trugala-tiktok-jewelry-scam-fools-customers-with-revenge-videos-2023-6