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 mere exposure to content; TikTok is the platform that provides the richest exposure data, by comparison with other sources. Twice per week, participants were also asked via WhatsApp or email to use a WhatsApp diary to identify social issues which they encountered in recent days, where they encountered them, whether they followed up on them in some way, and how they thought about those issues.
In total, the 22 participants reported encountering over 1,000 distinct issues, and the project then correlated these with the social media data donations; these were enriched by scraping the content of any media objects or URLs in the data donations. The Dutch public broadcaster NOS emerged as a key source here; however, a Dutch Moroccan news page also emerged as influential on Instagram, but only one person also mentioned it in their media diary. This might indicate reporting biases or misperceptions, limited recall, or underestimations of influence.
Next steps in this work will require further comparisons between follow, view, search, and engagement patterns, and compare reported issues from the media diaries with actual issue encounters in the data donations. There is also a temporal angle here: what are the engagement sequences across platforms here, and which encounters become part of the participants narratives about these issues?
