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 …
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 …
I’m chairing the final paper session for today at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, which starts with Hekmat Alrouh; his interest is in the study of grocery shopping behaviours in Dutch supermarkets, and this will involve data donations of loyalty card information.
To test this idea, he began with a GDPR request to two supermarkets for his own shopping data; those data packages arrived two weeks later, but they looked very different from what he could see on his loyalty apps. He then contacted the higher-level executives in these corporations directly, by guessing their email …
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 at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joris Mulder, representing the Dutch LISS panel study which asked panel participants to donate their insights on energy use. LISS is a representative Dutch panel of some 7,500 participants; it includes a data donation element built on the Port software which only extracts the data points that are required.
However, in this study people were asked to directly upload their energy use insights as unstructured data to the survey. These may include screenshots, datasets, emails from energy providers, and other materials, and such participation was …
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 …
And the final speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Ericka Menchen-Trevino from BRIC, who will present a browser extension framework for capturing chatbot conversations that seeks to circumvent some of the issues with formal data donation processes. Data donations build on the right for users to download their platform history data, of course, but this is often made deliberately complex and time-consuming by the platforms; the data contained in such packages are often incomplete and poorly documented, too, and contain highly sensitive personalised data that researchers need to strip …
The next speakers in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin are Alexandra Wölfle and Michaela Forrai, whose interest is in linking panel data with chatbot history data donations. Their focus is on emerging adults, aged 18-29 – these are now also a key demographic for chatbot use, with some two thirds likely to have used a chatbot, for a range of purposes including informational and instrumental, social support, personal identity, and entertainment and escapism use.
Such chatbot use may foster wellbeing especially in professional contexts; but it may also have detrimental effects especially …
