Research Project

Investigator:
Laura Aade

Abstract:
The nature of social media has drastically changed over the years. Initially, social media served as a space for users to connect and interact with each other by sharing content. However, in recent years, many social media platforms have evolved into commercial hubs, incorporating e-commerce features that enable users to conclude transactions. This development, known as social commerce, has given rise to a new category of online platforms, which I refer to as social marketplaces. In terms of consumer protection, the emergence of social commerce brings new questions related to the responsibilities of social media platforms. To shed light on their duties, however, one must first perform the legal exercise of defining these platforms from a legal perspective. This comparative research project therefore aims to investigate how social media platforms engaging in social commerce can be qualified and defined under EU and US consumer law. To tackle this issue, it focuses on TikTok as a case study and is structured as follows. Drawing on media and communication scholarship, this research project first describes the e-commerce functionalities on TikTok available to users in both jurisdictions. Second, it analyses these functionalities in light of definitional frameworks embedded in EU and US consumer law. Lastly, it critically compares the strengths and weaknesses of each definitional framework to capture the new role played by social media platforms in e-commerce and based on this comparative analysis, proposes a legal theoretical characterization of the Internet’s new social marketplaces.”