I am working on several projects related to online manipulation and unfair digital practices that make people do things that are not in their best interest and/or believe things that are not true. Together with Raphaël Gellert, Colin M. Gray, Arianna Rossi, and Cristiana Santos, I am organizing a workshop — “Fair patterns for online interfaces” — which aims to propose countermeasures (‘fair patterns’) to such unfair practices and which will take place in January 2024. Furthermore, Ashley Sheil, Gunes Acar, Raphaël Gellert, David Malone, and I are studying the practices that make canceling newspaper subscriptions arduous or confusing. You can find the preprint of our article “Staying at the Roach Motel: Cross-Country Analysis of Manipulative Subscription and Cancellation Flows” on arXiv. In addition, a project by Gunes Acar, Raphaël Gellert, Aditya Kumar Purohit and me is investigating the boundaries of fairness in the context of e-commerce. Similarly, a project with Raphaël Gellert and Marie-Sophie Simon examines the blurry line between online persuasion and manipulation. Also, a project with Jorrit Geels, Mariska Kleemans, and Martin Tanis investigates interventions to counter online misinformation. Next to this, I am currently playing around with the idea of producing an awareness game called ‘Click no’. A sketch of the first level is already online. So far, it only works with a mouse and does not support touchscreen devices. You can find the draft of the game here: http://gamesterdam.nl. Finally, I regularly supervise student theses on topics related to unfair/fair digital practices. So far, two of these theses have resulted in scientific papers:
Tiemessen, J., Schraffenberger, H., & Acar, G. T. (2023). The time is ticking: The effect of limited time discounts on consumers’ buying behavior and experience. In CHI Extended Abstracts (p. 277:1–277:11). ACM.
Graßl, P., Schraffenberger, H., Borgesius, F., & Buijzen, M. (2021). Dark and bright patterns in cookie consent requests. Journal of Digital Social Research.
