New research from James Cooper, Garrett Johnson, Tesary Lin, and  Liang Zhong uses YouTube’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) as a natural experiment to evaluate the impact of eliminating personalization— including tailored ads and platform features like personalized search and content recommendations—on made-for-kids content.  The study of  5,066 top American YouTube channels from 2018-2020 finds that child-directed content creators produce 13% less content and pivot towards producing non-child-directed content. On the demand side, views of child-directed channels fall by 22%. Consistent with the platform’s degraded capacity to match viewers to content, the study finds that content creation and content views become more concentrated among top child-directed YouTube channels.  Read the full study here.

University of Texas at Austin Fred And Emily Marshall Wulff Centennial Chair in Law Abraham Wickelgren has a new publication titled “Optimal Privacy Regulation When Consumers Make Inferences From Regulatory Policy“. The piece can be accessed here.

St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law Assistant Professor of Law Gregory M. Dickinson has published a new paper titled “Privately Policing Dark Patterns“. The publication can be accessed here.

Li Jiang, assistant professor of marketing at George Washington University School of Business, has a new paper on the effects of the EU’s data privacy law, General Data Protection Regulation. The piece can be accessed here.