The last panel for today at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is on cross-platform news exposure, and starts with Michael Bossetta, who introduces the Scroll Intercept project. This is a low-cost and reliable way to collect social media, which is necessary given the growing challenges with gathering social media data. Surveys have a recall bias; experiments cannot replicate personalised feeds; digital trace data as well as data donations are great but complicated.
So, instead, this project builds on the old-fashioned method of street intercepts, but actually asks people to open up their phones and show what’s in their social media feeds. In the first iteration, this Scroll Intercept approach asks whether and what political content people see in the first minute of scrolling social media feeds on their phone – and in fact to define whether what they see on those phones is political or not.
In the first place, this will take place through fieldwork by students on university campuses and in other public spaces; it will focus on people aged 18-29 or 55 and over, ask them to scroll their phones for two minutes, and to find a ‘political’ post. The interviewer logs the success of approaches to people, and reads the interview script, while the observer records the responses and times the scrolling task.
No personal data are recorded in this process; interviewer and observer never view, record, or photograph the interviewee’s phone; answers are transcribed rather than captured verbatim; and intercept data are sent directly to a secure server, rather than recorded on a local device.
The Scroll Intercept project is now looking for research groups around the world to participate in this project; it requires three teams of two students who contribute 2 x 3 hours, or 100 approaches or 10 intercepts. This is done in public sites (which may need permission), and translation of materials into local languages may also be necessary. Student teams are trained and their understanding validated before they go out into the field. All participants receive co-authorship on subsequent publications.
