Legal Expert in online content moderation
PhD on access restrictions on social media platforms
LL.M. in IT-law (University of Copenhagen) and IP-law (University of Leiden)
Currently:
Online transparency and content moderation at the European Commission
Previously:
Lecturer in EU Internet law || Copenhagen Business School
Visiting scholar ||
CIRSFID (2022) || TILT (2022)
Legal analyst Clarivate's Darts-IP
Berdien van der Donk is an international legal expert on online content moderation. She currently works at the European Commission on the enforcement of the Digital Services Act.
She was a visiting fellow at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) and the Centre for Research in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Law and Computer Science (CIRSFID) at the University of Bologna. She has taught EU Internet Law at Copenhagen Business School for four years and has worked outside of academia as a legal analyst for trademark and domain name cases at Clarivate’s Darts-IP.
Berdien holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen titled ‘Digital Bouncers’ (2023).
In her dissertation, she focused on the complex issue of questionable content removals and account suspensions on social media platforms in the European Union. The dissertation’s biggest contribution to the legal field lies in the unifying power of the roadmap. Streamlining the application of the various fields of law allows decision-makers to reach (more) uniform outcomes, which will ultimately benefit European platform users. The roadmap guides all parties involved in content moderation decisions on platforms, including judges in the Member States, social media platforms, and out-of-court dispute resolution bodies.
Her work is published or forthcoming in the European Intellectual Property Review, the Journal of Human Rights Practice, the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice, the Yearbook of Socio-Economic Constitutions, the European Review of Digital Administration & Law, and European Review of Private Law. Previously, she was one of the 16 scholars participating in the 2022 cohort of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center's and Lumen's research sprint exploring Best Practices for Transparency around Online Content Takedowns.