Catalina Goanta

"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.

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…

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

I think (and see anecdotally) that the potential of making money while talking about your country’s pain points & messianic salvation rallied a massive wave of REAL supporters who mostly engage in polarizing actions

Yes there are fake accounts, but it’s vital to remember TikTok has a plethora of monetization models. Although unclear so far, it’s very likely this money was given to sympathizers through GIFTS. Basically electoral fraud through emojis
support.tiktok.com/en/live-gifts-…

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…

We first have to see how this works even for more centralized (and much larger) platforms

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/