Social Media

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Christina Haag, whose focus is on social media exposure and adolescent body satisfaction. Social media use by young people has been a significant field of debate in recent times, with several countries attempting to introduce social media bans for young people; this study explores what kind of material young people actually see, such as beauty videos on TikTok.

The study explores whether extensive exposure to beauty videos amongst female adolescents affects end-of-day body satisfaction. But how can we measure such exposure? Approaches here might include …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Nir Grinberg, whose interest has been for some time in the dissemination of mis- and disinformation: this has found that a vanishingly small number of accounts is responsible for the vast majority of mis- and disinformation exposure and sharing. More recently, this has also led to the establishment of the Digital Sphere Observatory, which explores the dark patterns in online communication.

This is prompted especially by the shift of what used to be more public social media conversations into end-to-end-encrypted (e2ee) conversation spaces like WhatsApp …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Theo Araujo, whose interest is in inferential biases in data donation samples. Willingness to donate data to such studies is very unevenly distributed, and this also means that we lack data on non-participants; but do such biases on donation patterns actually result in biases in the eventual analysis?

This study worked with an existing true probability sample in the Netherlands, and investigated personality traits, ideological beliefs, and digital skills as the main sources of potential bias in the willingness to donate data …

The next session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Jessica Daikeler, whose interest is in data donation studies focussing on WhatsApp. It remains unclear what drives people’s willingness to donate data to such studies, however, and this study tests these patterns. Who donates very directly influences the results of such studies, of course: data donors represent only a very small subset of the overall population, and are usually not very representative of it.

Such participation bias begins with the consent process: this introduces frictions, and loses participants in the process. Further, those who …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Zoltán Kmetty, whose focus is on difference between participant intentions and actual donations to data donation projects. There is a considerable willingness-to-donation gap, and methodological interventions are required to address this; the present project tested this during the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election by using AI chatbots as data donation assistants.

The study employed a standard data donation approach, but in the data donation module briefing split the participant base into two groups: one received a static data export guide, and the other …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Sophia Graf, whose focus is on the Dein Feed, Deine Wahl project conducted during several 2026 state elections in Germany. This uses data donations to study how TikTok distributes political content during these elections; it recruiters participants during public events and also reflects back to donors how their own content and engagement patterns compare to other TikTok users.

This is a form of citizen science, involving ordinary citizens in political communication research. Such approaches can increase the diversity of perspectives in the …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Elisabeth Schmidbauer, whose interest is especially in the role of visual communication in recruiting data donations. This was tested by using eye tracking and a post-exposure walkthrough of the eye-tracking data, in an experimental setting.

Key theoretical backgrounds here include social presence, tested by including a picture of the researcher in recruitment materials; the impact of AI-generated images in the communication of studies, where (poorly designed) AI content might put off potential participants; and the question of how much potential participants engage …

The next session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Olya Hakobyan, whose focus is on the question of how to scale up data donation studies. The first challenge is how to motivate and recruit participants, which is centrally a question of trust in the researchers; the second is dropouts of participants due to technical difficulties; the next is managing the influx of data donations, especially if studies have been able to recruit a substantial number of participants; and finally studies also need to confront the challenge of varying data quality in donations.

Olya’s …

It’s the first day in October, and I’ve made my way to the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, and we start today with a keynote by Jasper Tjaden from the University of Potsdam, whose topic is social media data acquisition through social research bots. This is especially valuable for social media audit studies; it moves beyond the understanding of bots as problematic actors that meddle in information and communication flows, and instead uses bots for good.

Such bots then become a vehicle for data collection, and fight for transparency in data science. One way of doing …

The second day at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by the fabulous Katrin Weller from GESIS, whose focus is on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its implications for search studies. Much of this focusses on Article 40, which requires very large online platforms and search engines (VLOPs/VLOSEs) to provide data access to researchers – which is helpful, but not a perfect solution.

Very large here means over 45 million users in the EU (10% of the EU population), and some 25 platforms have been designated under the DSA by now; these include social …