Elections

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is the great Bruna Paroni, whose focus is on the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections in Brazil; the former elected the far-right anti-establishment candidate Jair Bolsonaro, while the latter saw the return of leftist Lula.

This same period also saw significant changes to the Facebook algorithm, from a downranking of news during 2018 through the emergency measures enacted after the 2020 US presidential election and coup attempt to a 2022 reduction of ‘political’ content (by some nebulous in-house definition) in users’ personal feeds …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Corinna Hertweck and Giovanni Astante, whose focus is on voting in Switzerland’s frequent referenda. How do Google’s and Bing’s AI Overviews perform in such contexts?

Referenda happen at all levels of Swiss democracy, with approximately four such votes (sometimes on several issues) happen per annum, and are surrounded by lively public debate. Information retrieved from AI Overviews might play a significant role in influencing voters’ decision-making processes; importantly, too, such votes are binary yes/no choices, which makes them different from conventional election decisions.

How often …

And the next speaker at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Patrick Parschan, presenting a paper that some of of my colleagues have also had a little input into. The focus here is on what sources are present in AI search results on information relating to elections; the focus here is especially on a number of recent German state elections.

Google and Bing have of course recently rolled out AI-generated search summaries, which have displaced the conventional organic search results; how such summaries are produced remains largely opaque at this point. This produces new risks: search is already a …

The first paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg that I’m attending is on search engines and political information, and starts with Íris Damião, whose focus is on political bias in search engines and Large Language Models. Search engines have evolved a lot since they emerged in the 1990s, of course, but continue to be very widely trusted by their users – even when searching for some very sensitive information.

This is the case for instance when searching for election information, where people also search for information on election procedures, party programmes, and even whom to vote for …