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 research investigates the creator economy on social media, examining how influencers monetise their content and the socio-legal implications of these practices. I develop computational methods, primarily based on NLP, to address challenges such as measuring toxicity, detecting sponsored content, and ensuring transparency and regulatory compliance. In practice, I integrate interdisciplinary insights from law and social sciences into computational tasks, creating annotation frameworks, machine learning models, and data resources.

I am currently focusing on the intersection of political speech and social media, analysing how influencers engage in political advertising and the regulatory complexities that arise from these activities. From a technical perspective, I am interested in approaches for operationalising political speech as NLP tasks and integrating sociolinguistic context into large language models, particularly for legal applications. My work aims to provide empirical evidence and practical solutions to improve transparency within the creator economy.

news

Oct 08, 2024 I am defending my PhD on the 7th of November at 16h! I will share the YouTube link for the livestream once it is available.
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 25, 2024 Our paper The Monetisation of Toxicity: Analysing YouTube Content Creators and Controversy-Driven Engagement was accepted 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. 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
  2. ig_paper.png
    Influencer Self-Disclosure Practices on Instagram: A Multi-Country Longitudinal Study
    Thales Bertaglia, Catalina Goanta, Gerasimos Spanakis, and Adriana Iamnitchi
    Submitted to Online Social Networks and Media (under review), 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
  4. alyt.png
    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