Niels Bohr has been hugely influential both in physics and outside physics, but he is also hugely misunderstood, partly because a few of his writings have been overstudied at the expense of many others. This ERC project is devoted to his philosophical legacy, and will establish an unprejudiced understanding of Bohr, building on a current revival of interest in Bohr’s ideas in the philosophy of physics, and extending it among other things to his wider influence in other scientific disciplines, specifically in biology, and on general debates such as on science and objectivity. The project will systematically exploit the resources of the Niels Bohr Archive in Copenhagen, which has only recently started digitising its collections. This ERC project has the ambition to rectify historical misjudgements and to build bridges between physics and philosophy, between different schools in philosophy of physics, between philosophy of physics and philosophy of biology, and even between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. The relevant resources are only now becoming more widely available. It is a large and methodologically novel project, combining philosophy and history, involving the systematic study of extensive sources, and including applications to philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology and general philosophy of science. Historically informed analysis has long proved to be an important tool in the philosophy of science, and the project will lead the way in applying a historically accurate understanding of Bohr’s thought to 21st-century debates.

Human ads are Internet influencers who earn revenue by creating and monetizing authentic and relatable advertising content for their armies of followers, by relying on business models such as influencer and affiliate marketing. This content often results not only in commercial but also political (hidden) ads, which look the same, are posted by the same persons, are displayed in the same digital space, to the same audiences, and raise the same transparency issues. In this environment, consumers and citizens can no longer distinguish between ads and non-ads, and between commercial and political communications. They are faced with a double transparency problem: (i) human ads have incentives to hide commercial interests, and (ii) platforms have incentives to algorithmically amplify human ads engagement in opaque ways. This reflects a general good faith and fair dealing problem: the social media economy is increasingly based on deceit, which leads to new forms of vulnerability for consumers and citizens on digital markets. Given its complexity and relative novelty, this phenomenon has not yet been the object of sustained academic or regulatory inquiry. HUMANads tackles this comprehensive research gap by exploring why a general European legal regime on fair advertising by human ads on social media platforms is necessary, and what it would entail. First, it articulates new theory of fair advertising in EU consumer law, in the context of content monetization by human ads across commercial and political speech. Second, it gathers evidence relating to business models, advertising prevalence and legal uncertainty through innovative interdisciplinary methods including digital ethnography, comparative law and natural language processing (NLP). Third, it proposes criteria for the assessment of resulting consumer harms, and translates them into a new normative governance model mandating more stringent transparency obligations on social media platforms.