Catalina Goanta

I am Associate Professor in Private Law and Technology and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, focused on understanding the impact of content monetization on social media and on reinterpreting private law fairness in the context of platform governance. Between 2016-2021 I was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, and during February 2018 - February 2019, I was a Niels Stensen fellow and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society). I'm also a non-residential fellow of the Stanford Transatlantic Technology Law Forum.

My research follows three main themes:

Content/web monetization and social media governance - the Internet is helping regular users make money in ways that did not exist 10 years ago, such as influencer marketing or ad revenue. In this context, I use doctrinal legal methods to critically reflect on existing and desirable regulatory frameworks surrounding online harms (e.g. content moderation; platform discretion; misleading advertising). To bring together complementing disciplines contributing to this field, I also established and coordinate, with Jerry Spanakis, the Computational Social Media research group.
Privacy, cryptography and decentralization - it is expected that the new age of the Internet will be rooted in technologies meant to enhace privacy, or decentralize decision-making. In this context I use legal and social science approaches to the study of cryptocommunities (e.g. dark web market places).
Digital monitoring tools for consumer protection - the enforcement of law through public interest technology is one of the most essential legal topics of the coming decade. By collaborating with experts in Natural Language Processing and Privacy and Security, I am contributing to the development of tools which can be used by public institutions (e.g. detecting influencer marketing business models on Instagram).
I have the priviledge of supervising four very talented researchers in their PhD research:

Thales Bertaglia (computer scientist working on computational social media studies), Maastricht University
Constanta Rosca (legal scholar working on dark patterns and EU consumer law), Maastricht University
Alex Sotropa (legal scholar working on computational antitrust and consumer protection), VU Amsterdam
Jacob van de Kerkhof (legal scholar working on freedom of expression in US/EU), Utrecht University