Description du projet
Nouvelles obligations de transparence pour les plateformes de réseaux sociaux
Les influenceurs sur les réseaux sociaux peuvent gagner leur vie en créant et en monétisant un contenu publicitaire authentique et auquel on peut s’identifier, appelé «publicités humaines». Ce contenu n’est pas seulement commercial, il peut aussi contenir des publicités politiques cachées. Il est donc difficile pour les consommateurs de faire la distinction entre les publicités et les autres. Le projet HUMANads, financé par l’UE, explorera cette tendance. Il étudiera l’intérêt de mettre en place un régime juridique européen général sur la publicité loyale dans le domaine de la publicité humaine. Il proposera également un nouveau modèle de gouvernance normative pour des obligations de transparence plus strictes sur les plateformes de réseaux sociaux. Le projet formulera une nouvelle théorie de la publicité loyale dans le droit européen de la consommation, collectera des preuves concernant les modèles commerciaux, la prévalence de la publicité et l’incertitude juridique, et proposera des critères pour l’évaluation des dommages subis par les consommateurs.
Objectif
Human ads are Internet influencers who earn revenue by creating and monetizing authentic and relatable advertising content for their armies of followers, by relying on business models such as influencer and affiliate marketing. This content often results not only in commercial but also political (hidden) ads, which look the same, are posted by the same persons, are displayed in the same digital space, to the same audiences, and raise the same transparency issues. In this environment, consumers and citizens can no longer distinguish between ads and non-ads, and between commercial and political communications. They are faced with a double transparency problem: (i) human ads have incentives to hide commercial interests, and (ii) platforms have incentives to algorithmically amplify human ads engagement in opaque ways. This reflects a general good faith and fair dealing problem: the social media economy is increasingly based on deceit, which leads to new forms of vulnerability for consumers and citizens on digital markets. Given its complexity and relative novelty, this phenomenon has not yet been the object of sustained academic or regulatory inquiry. HUMANads tackles this comprehensive research gap by exploring why a general European legal regime on fair advertising by human ads on social media platforms is necessary, and what it would entail. First, it articulates new theory of fair advertising in EU consumer law, in the context of content monetization by human ads across commercial and political speech. Second, it gathers evidence relating to business models, advertising prevalence and legal uncertainty through innovative interdisciplinary methods including digital ethnography, comparative law and natural language processing (NLP). Third, it proposes criteria for the assessment of resulting consumer harms, and translates them into a new normative governance model mandating more stringent transparency obligations on social media platforms.
Champ scientifique
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Thème(s)
Régime de financement
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedInstitution d’accueil
3584 CS Utrecht
Pays-Bas