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 relative unobservability of such platforms poses new risks for democracy, and the emergence of AI agents as participants in such spaces further complicates these developments.
The DSO provides a private, secure, and ethical platform for citizen data donations of group chats on such platforms; building on the Matrix protocol, it aims to produce a representative picture and focusses especially on election integrity and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI).
Participants are invited to donate data to the platform by connecting it to WhatsApp or Telegram and selecting which group chats (defined as having more than five participants) to donate to the Observatory it has access to; they are also able to provide ratings for these chats. A pilot study has shown that the most significant drop-out in potential contributors occurs when users are asked to create an account and connect to WhatsApp or Telegram; subsequent attrition is much smaller.
Interestingly, in the Israeli context this pilot has been able to attract donations from both Israeli and Arab participants, and across several different age groups; younger participants have donated more Telegram than WhatsApp data, however. Larger-scale studies will still need to be conducted with this, however.
