And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in video-based data donation, in the specific context of TikTok. Data donation is now a growing trend in digital media studies, of course, and many workable approaches to this have been developed, but to work with this approach remains difficult in practice.
TikTok is a key target for this – both because of its current importance with certain user demographics, the limitations of its API, and the fact that API-based observations do not accurately represent the experience of actual users. The present study worked with some 100 Dutch adolescents, whose data donations amounted to some 23 million activities over an average of 3.6 years per participant.
TikTok data packages contain only URLs and timestamps, but not video titles, descriptions, or metadata; this means that such additional datapoints still need to be gathered after the fact, if these videos are still publicly available. Without such enriched data, participants also have only limited ability to check these videos for information they would not like to share – and with hundreds of thousands of URLs encountered by some users, to sift through these would be a massive task at any rate.
Working with minors also means a need for dual consent from users and their parents, and increases the need to be particularly careful with the data provided by participants. There were also problems with the in-app data donation package download functions provided by TikTok (this was a temporary glitch at the time), the EU GDPR data download package turned out to be more comprehensive, yet then often too large to process.
The EU GDPR access request process is also much slower, which means additional efforts to follow up with users to remind them to download and donate their data once available. This does not help with drop-out rates. Repeated requests produced different datasets, and data donation packages often have various technical issues.
Interestingly, Dutch was only the 14th-most used language in this dataset; timespans covered ranged from two days to nine years. Downloading the 23 million videos produces some 9 terabytes of data, and further processing them is of course even more computationally intensive.
However, there are substantial investigative opportunities in this approach, yet it is also limited with respect to exploring features of TikTok as a platform that such data donations cannot effectively cover. Data donations are a translation process, which translate a personal legal right into usable datasets for research.
