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....

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…

For instance, you can stream yourself while random people dox their friends’ phone numbers and voting choices, and the streamer (in this case an older man) will call them to unleash homophobic & misogynistic slurs while the 1800 people watching give you gifts

@taylorannabell.bsky.social has mapped the policies of some main social media platforms on political ads (and in our project we consider a much broader scope of ads that also include native ads eg influencer marketing)

Regulators around the world

Takeaways:
💫 a lot of influencers feel they can speak about elections but without authenticity;
💫ad disclosures - what are those?
💫where’s the content moderation at since TikTok does not allow for political branded content as shown by @taylorannabell.bsky.social 👇🏼

A lot of people watched these 40 videos but the engagement was minimal. Also, out of 40 influencers/videos only 7 disclosed the post as an ad.

Most of the influencers in this small dataset are nano and micro from a vast array of industries: from beauty, fitness, travel, to vet students and even a TikTok famous RO grandma.

The inferred brief followed a recognizable pattern focused on asking the audience to reflect on the ideal candidate:

The campaign was allegedly pushed on an influencer discovery platform where brands can offer collabs. It was obvious that it’s a campaign due to the co-occurrence of a general & a specific # as well as the structure of the videos.

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...

✨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...

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)