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.

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 👇

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.

For election funding, ANY monetization product is relevant because it provides incentives and infrastructure to raise an army of users, all while TikTok gets a chunk of the money (in the case of gifts around 50%). Lives & payments also need transparency, not just platform ads

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