Thales Bertaglia

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Hi! I’m Thales Bertaglia, a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Law, Economics, and Governance at Utrecht University. I’m currently working on the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, which focuses on understanding the impact of content monetisation on social media and reinterpreting private law fairness in platform governance. My work bridges computational social science, digital governance, and legal perspectives, with a focus on empowering stakeholders and making digital ecosystems more transparent, accountable, and fair.

I study the creator economy and, more broadly, social media platforms, investigating how content monetisation, algorithmic systems, and platform regulation interact. My research combines machine learning, natural language processing, and other computational methods to develop tools for detecting online harms, evaluating the impact of governance interventions, and operationalising legal norms into computational tasks. I am particularly interested in building reproducible, explainable, and legally grounded AI systems that support users, creators, researchers, and regulators.

news

Jan 16, 2025 Our paper Influencer self-disclosure practices on Instagram: A multi-country longitudinal study is out in Online Social Networks & Media!
Nov 26, 2024 I defended my PhD on the 7th of November! You can watch the defence here and read my thesis here.
Sep 09, 2024 Our paper The Monetisation of Toxicity: Analysing YouTube Content Creators and Controversy-Driven Engagement won the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at OASIS 2024!
Jul 01, 2024 Our paper Across Platforms and Languages: Dutch Influencers and Legal Disclosures on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok was accepted at ASONAM 2024!

selected publications

  1. osnem_instagram.png
    Influencer self-disclosure practices on Instagram: A multi-country longitudinal study
    Thales Bertaglia, Catalina Goanta, Gerasimos Spanakis, and Adriana Iamnitchi
    Online Social Networks and Media, 2025
  2. instasynth.png
    InstaSynth: Opportunities and Challenges in Generating Synthetic Instagram Data with ChatGPT for Sponsored Content Detection
    Thales Bertaglia, Lily Heisig, Rishabh Kaushal, and Adriana Iamnitchi
    In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media , 2024
  3. closing_the_loop.png
    Closing the Loop: Testing ChatGPT to Generate Model Explanations to Improve Human Labelling of Sponsored Content on Social Media
    Thales Bertaglia, Stefan Huber, Catalina Goanta, Gerasimos Spanakis, and Adriana Iamnitchi
    In Explainable Artificial Intelligence , 2023
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    Abusive language on social media through the legal looking glass
    Thales Bertaglia, Andreea Grigoriu, Michel Dumontier, and Gijs Dijck
    In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021) , 2021