TL;DR: have a look at the piece in the New York Times that covers Niels’ work.

During the research Niels did for datactive, which culminated in his thesis and a recent paper in New Media & Society, he actively participated in the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). The IETF is one of the main standards and governance bodies of the Internet. While working there Niels’ worked together with others such as Mallory Knodel and Corinne Cath, on addressing exclusionary language in technical standards. An important part of that work was publishing this document, which sparked an extensive discussion in the IETF that up to today has not been resolved. You can read more about it in the New York Times piece.