Stefania’s thesis addresses a novel technological phenomenon – the existence of social media influencers that are fully virtual. More importantly, she focuses on the question if such completely “fake” agents have an influence on young female consumers that go beyond them buying products that those virtual influencers recommend. In her thesis, she examines if those often completely unrealistically beautiful agents set standards unachievable beauty standards for young females. Stefania’s thesis therefore fits in ASF goal Sustainable Economy, sub-goal Responsible production, consumption, and marketing. Her thesis is remarkable first and foremost, because she took the courage to study a completely new topic for which very little existing literature is available. She navigates neighboring field’s literature (i.e., Information Science) and manages to reflect on this novel literature with remarkable maturity. Secondly, she displayed methodological rigor and effort, creating and pre-testing novel stimuli and ability to statistically address a rather complicated model on n=225 participants. Most importantly, her thesis, while written for Marketing, allows for important insights regarding societal impact. She not only test if virtual influencers can negatively affect the self-esteem of young women, but she also further examines what times of intervention efforts could be taken to attenuate such negative effects. While women participating in this study seemed to be aware, at least to a certain extent, that the image presented was not that of a real human, this did not stop them from comparing their appearance to that of the virtual influencer, showing further evidence that social comparison might occur automatically even when the comparison agent was deemed irrelevant. She therefore tested two intervention disclaimers on these virtual agents. Even though the disclaimer was evident (using the words “Warning” and “not real” and the colour red) and most participants correctly recalled the disclaimer shown on the image, the effect of the highly anthropomorphised virtual influencer did not change. These findings are incredibly important as more and more countries try to regulate the (social) media space with such disclaimers. Understanding that they do not achieve the desired effect is therefore relevant for regulators and society at large.