About the Project

Online platforms currently play a central role in our information and communication diet.

For instance, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, online meetings on platforms such as Teams, Zoom, or Meet are hard to think away in the day- to-day business of many organisations. This is altering our life, exposing us to new and/or augmented risks to our fundamental rights (mental manipulation, privacy violations, online safety, algorithmic discrimination, online stigmatisation, etc.), which also increases the need to rethink public policy.

RESOCIAL seeks to identify, measure, and mitigate human vulnerabilities to enhance the resilience of vulnerable users on social media platforms.

The deployment of social media platforms carries with them a number of legal, technological and social challenges, especially considering the increased vulnerability of users and the lack of mitigation measures to avoid or reduce potential harm they currently experience.

RESOCIAL recognises the practical regulatory and socio-legal challenges that social media platforms (in traditional versions or through new immersive technologies) pose, considering vulnerable users.

RESOCIAL addresses three problems

The lack of scientific methods to measure risks to fundamental rights online, especially considering the risks of
insecurity, discrimination, stigmatisation, manipulation and social pressure, and new forms of risks for (groups of) vulnerable users on social media platforms and the metaverse. Without a specific, robust, reliable and systematic measurement of risks to fundamental rights, they will not count.
The ineffectiveness of governments and regulators to leverage the existing legislation (including the DSA and the GDPR) and soft law tools to mitigate these risks by leaving fundamental design choices to the private sector (self-regulation).
The ineffective protection of vulnerable users by social media platforms, considering the power imbalance suffered by users and their toxic social dependence on private platforms that promise to mitigate their physical or social vulnerabilities but produce a negative impact on the possibility of exercising fundamental rights.

Project Work Packages

Work Package 1 – Measuring social media vulnerabilities

Propose and validate a clear framework to measure risks and human vulnerabilities on social media platforms. WP1 will examine both social media environments and the metaverse. After developing an initial frameworks based on desk research, WP1 will utilise co-design with cooperation partners to refine the framework, particularly with relevance to four specific use cases: children, consumers in a vulnerable position, data subjects in a vulnerable position, and victims of online violence.

Work Package 2 – Addressing the law for the resilience of vulnerable users of social media

WP2 aims to identify gaps in (national and European) laws and regulations relating to vulnerable groups and to investigate which legal instruments can be used to address vulnerabilities of these groups. WP2 has the objective to contribute to Outcome 3 (The Dutch Government can proactively implement the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act and the AI Act, enhancing individual’s resilience on social media) and Outcome 4 (Relevant Dutch public authorities can proactively develop a policy frameworks for addressing digital vulnerability on AI-driven platforms).

Work Package 3 – Vulnerability-sensitive design and self-regulation

Propose and validate best practices that can lead to a Code of Conduct for Vulnerability on Social Media that could: 1) Promote together with the societal partners the best practices about “vulnerability-sensitive design”; 2) Mitigate those new forms of digital vulnerabilities by treasuring the lessons learnt of the special resilience of traditionally vulnerable groups.

Meet our team

The creation of the Consortium has been like putting together a puzzle that, on the one hand, could cover all the complementary expertise able to offer distinct perspectives through which the research objectives will be achieved.