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The final speaker in this last paper session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Theo Araujo, presenting the Macroscope project for investigating complex societal issues at scale. This brings together various key Dutch organisations in the humanities and social sciences, and seeks to develop a substantial number of methodological solutions and data observatories.

One aspect of this is to develop a Netherlands Media Corpus, bringing together conventional and emerging media sources (news, podcasts, television, social media) in a single corpus; building on this, it will then develop a Web & Media Diets Observatory that …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is also on the comparison of different data donation approaches. There are many different data donation approaches, and these need to be compared more directly to identify the least burdensome and most user-friendly frameworks.

This study seeks to compare download-upload and automated data donation approaches, to examine patterns in who donates data, and to determine how participants experience trust and privacy in data donation processes. It draws on an online panel of some 7,000 participants in Germany which is linked with …

The next speakers in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin are Nico Pfiffner and Sina Horner, whose focus is on TikTok data donations; they compare the Download-Upload and Portability API approaches to data donations. In the former, participants are asked to download their own data packages from the TikTok platform, and then upload them to a bespoke data donation platform. This is a complicated process and produces considerable attrition.

By contrast, the EU Digital Markets Act also requires platforms to provide a Portability API which researchers can access directly once approved by the …

The final session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in the embedding of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles into data donation procsses. Data donation approaches are still not very standardised, and highly study-specific; this is not necessarily the best approach, and more standardisation of approaches and tools could help embed FAIR principles here.

The RIGHTS project in the Netherlands seeks to advance these ideas by developing standards and templates for researchers, data stewards and ethics review boards, and policy-makers at research institutions, while building on existing data …

And the final speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joshua Claassen, who begins by highlighting the ongoing development of data donation approaches and mechanisms. But once data are collected, what do we do with them: how do we transform them into actual findings? There is a need for more standardised workflows in working with such data.

This project drew on data donations from Netflix users; such data packages contain personal viewing histories and other details, but also need to be connected with further information about the content viewed, and such …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Daria Szafran, whose focus is on the impacts of Instagram use on body image. Body image covers the entirety of a person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about their body, and since the emergence of social media there have been concerns about the impact of visual social media apps on such perceptions.

There are many cross-sectional and experimental studies on such impacts, but many of them are based on small and selective samples involving homogenous user groups, and Instagram usage measurements are often …

The next speaker in this morning session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joanna Strycharz, whose interest is in the connection between data donations and platform ad libraries. Personalised advertising on digital media platforms remains difficult to study, precisely because of the personalised and embedded nature of this advertising and the great diversity in ads run even by the same advertiser. Data available to researchers remain poor.

Various approaches for studying this include self-reporting, experiments, platform ad libraries, and tracking plug-ins, but none of these provide a complete user-level perspective on advertising. Data donations …

The second day at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Rianne Nienke Visscher, whose focus is on the consistence of the digital download packages used in data donation projects. This emerges from the WHAT-IF project, which aims to create a digital twin of the digital political information environment across a number of European projects. Very quickly, this project found that the data structures across individual donations were often slightly different.

This pointed the project to issues with the completeness, structure, changeability, and measurement of variables in data download packages. Such variations apply within platforms …

The final speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Tim Groot Kormelink, whose interest is in how issues arrive into people’s lifeworlds: how do they encounter news and information, and how do they make sense of this content? This is addressed here through longitudinal qualitative diaries, as well as data donations from various social media platforms. Such data donations were generated using the data donation package download functions offered by such platforms.

Data availability varied strongly across platforms, and actions on these platforms were generally more likely to be captured than …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Eva-Maria Vogel, whose study is a field experiment in the context of South Africa’s upcoming local elections in November 2026 that explores the impact of TikTok influencers on the election. There are already concerns about disinformation during the elections, and this project works with the AfricaCheck fact-checking organisation, which will develop fact-checks of current disinformation to be distributed by the project.

This tests, then, whether a single fact-checker account, a large-scale influencer, or a fleet of smaller-scale influencers are more effective at …