The DSA40 Data Access Tracker Keep track of your access application We call upon researchers and other non-profit organisations to share their data access requests with us, so that we can - inform the public about the success rate of access requests - develop guidance for successful access requests - inform ongoing regulatory processes

🚨 First DSA Art. 40(4) data access decisions are in! Coimisiún na Meán has sent out its first responses to researcher applications.

Did you apply for DSA data access? Log it in the DSA40 Tracker (takes ~10 min): www.soscisurvey.de/DSA40applica...

Your input helps build researcher support tools!

We will host a webinar to discuss what went wrong, what the process actually requires, and whether this regime risks creating inequalities between researchers.

(Timezone is CET)

🔗 Register here: forms.cloud.microsoft/e/yYQthSc2jX

If at first you don’t succeed: Reflections on a rejected Art. 40 DSA data access request - DSA Observatory By Catalina Goanta & Anda Iamnitchi Article 40 of the Digital Services Act was hailed as a breakthrough for platform research. But what does the the procedure look like in practice? Drawing on their o...

⚡ DSA Article 40 data access decisions are rolling in, and ours (with A. Iamnitchi & T. Bertaglia) was rejected (we applied on day 1). With help from the Dutch & Irish Digital Service Coordinators, we learned a lot - reflections up on the @dsaobservatory.bsky.social) shorturl.at/lGoFF

Law, Policy, and the Internet This innovative textbook edited by international experts in technology law and policy provides a comprehensive and accessible guide into the fast-evolving lands…

Wooo wooo ! you can now pre order and request inspection copies of Law Policy and the Internet, 2nd edn! w me, @mooseabyte.bsky.social and @cgoanta.bsky.social eds and an all star line up! Lots of AI but guaranteed no AI slop! Out August!

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/law-polic...

I really should check bluesky more often! So from the creator monetization perspective this looks a bit like trad blog/yt viewsmaxxing. But for creators now it’s more like yt/tt/insta interoperability for long+short video

Deepfake ‘Nudify’ Technology Is Getting Darker—and More Dangerous Sexual deepfakes continue to get more sophisticated, capable, easy to access, and perilous for millions of women who are abused with the technology.

NEW: As the EU starts investigating Grok over sexualized images, the harmful "nudify" ecosystem that targets women is getting even more dangerous.

A review of 50+ deepfake sites shows they nearly all offer image-to-video generators, producing highly explicit outputs. One offers 60+ sexual scenarios

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)

We live in the craziest timeline ever

Taylor Annabell led some of our research on the topic, where we look at an influencer discrimination case study: can an independent contractor benefit from non-discrimination protection in the EU? (not really). www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

3. Overall, the influencer's case reflects her being in a 'startup' phase: no business management, no apparent knowledge of the law (and its violaton): "I don't have an accountant, I'm not running a large company. I just make videos that go viral".

2. The court gave a lot of attention to the influencer's number of followers, arguing it is general knowledge that an account with 100,000 followers on Instagram can lead to some considerable monetization. The court confirmed some general sources like Forbes & blog posts used in the investigation.

1. There is still a lot of misunderstanding around barter and non-monetary compensation, and platforms have contributed to the shaping of a general view that "paid partnerships" are different than contributions in kind - disproved in practice in consumer law & tax law, but also social security law.

🧶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 now holding press briefings specifically for MAGA influencers ‘So what direction do you advise me to go into?’ one MAGA media personality asked during the first ‘official influencer’ briefing that Karoline Leavitt held this week

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.

Contesting Online Exclusion. EU-regulation of content moderation through an agonistic lens Naomi Appelman will defend the dissertation 'Contesting Online Exclusion. EU-regulation of content moderation through an agonistic lens'. Supervisors are Prof. N. Helberger and Prof. J.V.J. van Hoboken.

@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...

White House will reserve front-row seats in press briefings for influencers, podcasters, and others in “new media” When she took the podium for the first time on Tuesday afternoon, Karoline Leavitt became the youngest White House press secretary in history. The 27-year-old New Hampshire native is the sixth working...

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...

Zuckerberg urges Trump to stop the EU from fining US tech companies Comparing the bloc’s antitrust penalties to tariffs, the Meta boss argued that Brussels is “screwing with” American industry.

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 🇺🇸🇧🇷🇳🇱🇩🇪
>>>

The study of the legal professionalisation of influencers is in its infancy, and needs more attention. We provide a comprehensive web measurement of a unique influencer dataset which we manually curated. My favourite graph in the paper 👇

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 court does not come back to the disinformation point (and no mention in the application about national security), but it focused on the divergence between the expensive amplification of a campaign on social media, and the declaration by the candidate that 0 money was used.

The Court notes that social media has been used to make one candidate prominent, to the detriment of the other competitors. The use of digital technologies should be transparent. Social media platforms have an obligation to disclose the financing of electoral advertising.

The electoral process has been vitiated, and this distorted the free and accurate character of the vote. The state has a positive obligation to prevent unjustified interferences in the electoral process. This includes organised disinformation campaigns.