Together with Gina Leyva, Research MA student and student assistant at Tilburg University, I have been working on Trial by TikTok, a project examining how lawyers and non-lawyers claim authority when interpreting the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni legal dispute on TikTok. We are particularly interested in how legal expertise, documentary evidence, narrative interpretation, and judgments of credibility become intertwined in platformed public discourse.
The project was made possible by seed funding from the Academic Collaborative Center for Resilient Democratic Society (REDES) at Tilburg University. We will present our first findings at the REDES Year Event on September 24, 2026. The poster below, designed by Gina, presents the project, corpus, methodology, and some of our preliminary findings.
