MEDEA is pleased to highlight the participation of Adriana Mutu at the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) Workshop on “Economic Governance of Social Media”, held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, on September 25–26, 2025.
Adriana was invited to present her research poster, “TikTok’s Compliance with DSA Obligations for Protecting Minors and Addressing Systemic Risks: An Empirical Assessment” co-authored with Dr. Luminita Patras.
Scientific Background and Workshop Goals
In 2023, there were 4.76 billion social media users worldwide, representing 60% of the global population and over 90% of internet users. While social media provide significant benefits for businesses and individuals, their negative effects—such as misinformation, hate speech, behavioral manipulation, excessive screen time, and mental health concerns—pose growing societal challenges, particularly for children and young adults.
The TILEC workshop aimed to address these concerns through the lens of economic governance, which studies the structure and functioning of legal and social institutions that support economic activity, enforce contracts, protect rights, and provide organizational infrastructure. Economic governance encompasses public-ordering institutions (state authorities), private-ordering institutions (non-state actors), and hybrid forms, with the goal of identifying optimal institutional arrangements for regulating complex socio-economic environments.
This 2025 workshop marked TILEC’s seventh economic governance event, following previous workshops on competition (2010), organizations (2013), social preferences (2015), data-driven markets (2017), governance of big data and AI (2019), and political legitimacy (2022). Over two days, participants engaged in multidisciplinary, discussion-intensive, and policy-oriented sessions, exploring theoretical, empirical, experimental, and conceptual approaches to containing the negative effects of social media.