Catalina Goanta invited expert on EU Special Panel on child online safety

Catalina Goanta joined a Special Panel on child online safety, advising European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The EU is taking new steps to protect minors online. One of them is a new app for online age verification that is “technically ready” and will soon be available, the Commission has announced. A second meeting of the EU Special Panel on child online saftey was convened on 16 April.  Catalina Goanta, Associate Professor in Private Law and Technology at Utrecht University, joined the panel.

At the heart of this meeting was the regulatory framework protecting minors in the EU, Member States approaches to child safety and comparisons with international initiatives like Australia's social media ban, resulting in an multistakeholder exchange. The participants of the full-day meeting included youth representatives, legal specialists, computer scientists, medical professionals and child rights advocates. The discussions focused on new and improved approaches at EU level, as well as non-legislative initiatives that can ensure children are safer online.

Research on Children and Social Media 

At the Utrecht University School of Law and within the ERC project HUMANads, led by Catalina Goanta, researchers have been doing ethnographic, computational and legal research on children and social media, with a team and network of multidisciplinary experts such as Thales Bertaglia, Margje Camps, Taylor Annabell, Gerasimos Spanakis, Adriana Iamnitchi, Charlotte Mol and Tom Divon. Some of their papers are available open source:

- Child en family influencers op sociale media in Nederland
- Shedding light on child influencers: Insights on the influencer economy, Dutch private law and children's rights
- Children as concealed commodities: Ethnographic nuances and legal implications of kidfluencers’ monetisation on TikTok