Internet Technologies

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 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 …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Neil Thurman, whose focus is on age verification legislation across various states in the US, and its effect on the consumption of online pornography by under-18s. This is observed here via clickstream data.

Concerns about online pornography are as old as the Internet itself, and were instrumental in the development of the controversial US Communication Decency Act (CDA), signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996 and subsequently found to be unconstitutional; the US has not had any federal legislation to restrict online pornography since then …

The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.

His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the …

The next speakers in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town are Pascal Schneiders and Andreas Riedl, whose interest is in diversity-oriented news recommender systems. Such ‘responsible’ recommender systems are being promoted as algorithmic solutions to ensuring that users receive a diverse diet of news content; they might pick up on popularity, content, and collaboratively created cues.

The aim here is to nudge audiences towards certain content, breaking through their ideologically shaped, one-sided news exposure and resulting in more diverse news consumption. Attitudes towards such systems depend on technological optimism, feelings of information overload, and …

And the lucky last speaker in the final session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library in Frankfurt is the excellent Giada Marino, whose interest is the operation of data access provisions under DSA Article 40.12. The focus here is on very large online marketplace platforms and the systemic risks they pose to minors.

Article 40.12 addresses access to publicly available data from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines; this is coordinated across EU jurisdictions by the Expert Group on Access to Publicly Available Data (ECAT). The present project focusses on marketplace platforms such as …

The next speaker in the morning session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Veronica Batzendorfer, whose interest is in the Xitter-adjacent Grokipedia project as an ‘alternative’ to Wikipedia. Specifically, her focus is on semantic drift across Grokipedia’s versions, starting with material drawn in part from Wikipedia and then rewritten by LLMs.

Such semantic drift can be examined through a geometric framework. This works with two points in time and explores changes between them, across Wikipedia and Grokipedia; Wikipedia content serves as the training data for the LLM which generates articles for the Grokipedia, so …