Faculty Fellowship Program

CLIC Faculty Fellows receive support for research, scholarship and advocacy related to the study of information and creativity. The competitive fellowships are awarded for one year.

2023-2025 CLIC Faculty Fellow

ELETTRA BIETTI
Assistant Professor of Law and Computer Science
Project: The Data-Attention Imperative

Professor Elettra Bietti continues as a CLIC Faculty Fellow for 2024-2025. During the first year of her fellowship (2023-2024), Professor Bietti researched technology addiction and overuse and its related harms, particularly in the social media and gaming context.

In 2024-2025, Bietti plans to workshop and publish her article, “The Data-Attention Imperative,” in which she argues that the business models of data and attention hungry digital platforms produce harms that need to be specifically addressed by regulators.

Bietti is also organizing a roundtable event in April focused on digital attention and technology overuse, with a range of participants, including faculty and students from the School of Law, Khoury College of Computer Science, Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the D’Amore-Kim School of Business, as well as speakers and participants from the broader Boston tech policy community.

2022-2023 CLIC Faculty Fellow

ALEXANDRA ROBERTS
Professor of Law and Media, School of Law and Department of Music, College of Arts, Media and Design
Project: Multi-level Lies

Professor Roberts’ research explored the laws and regulations that govern misleading marketing claims made by and through lay sellers in the context of multi-level marketing companies (MLMs), including federal and state false advertising law and FTC and other agency regulations. MLMs are companies that sell products primarily or exclusively through non-salaried lay sellers. They are typically pyramidal in structure: people who sign up to sell products for the company have an initial or recurring buy-in and can earn money both by selling to friends and by recruiting others to sell—though the vast majority of sellers make no money at all. Many MLMs specialize in “wellness” products like essential oils, health and weight loss supplements, and beauty products. While questions about whether and when an MLM constitutes an illegal pyramid scheme have been researched and litigated, less attention has been paid to the regulation of marketing claims about the products themselves—regulation made particularly difficult by the fact that those claims are primarily disseminated by individual laypeople to small groups of friends or followers. Professor Roberts reviewed MLM seller contracts and instructions and interviewed MLM participants to gain a better understanding of how lay sellers understand and interpret the guidance provided.