Streaming Media

And the final speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joshua Claassen, who begins by highlighting the ongoing development of data donation approaches and mechanisms. But once data are collected, what do we do with them: how do we transform them into actual findings? There is a need for more standardised workflows in working with such data.

This project drew on data donations from Netflix users; such data packages contain personal viewing histories and other details, but also need to be connected with further information about the content viewed, and such …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Eva-Maria Vogel, whose study is a field experiment in the context of South Africa’s upcoming local elections in November 2026 that explores the impact of TikTok influencers on the election. There are already concerns about disinformation during the elections, and this project works with the AfricaCheck fact-checking organisation, which will develop fact-checks of current disinformation to be distributed by the project.

This tests, then, whether a single fact-checker account, a large-scale influencer, or a fleet of smaller-scale influencers are more effective at …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Christina Haag, whose focus is on social media exposure and adolescent body satisfaction. Social media use by young people has been a significant field of debate in recent times, with several countries attempting to introduce social media bans for young people; this study explores what kind of material young people actually see, such as beauty videos on TikTok.

The study explores whether extensive exposure to beauty videos amongst female adolescents affects end-of-day body satisfaction. But how can we measure such exposure? Approaches here might include …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Sophia Graf, whose focus is on the Dein Feed, Deine Wahl project conducted during several 2026 state elections in Germany. This uses data donations to study how TikTok distributes political content during these elections; it recruiters participants during public events and also reflects back to donors how their own content and engagement patterns compare to other TikTok users.

This is a form of citizen science, involving ordinary citizens in political communication research. Such approaches can increase the diversity of perspectives in the …

It’s the first day in October, and I’ve made my way to the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, and we start today with a keynote by Jasper Tjaden from the University of Potsdam, whose topic is social media data acquisition through social research bots. This is especially valuable for social media audit studies; it moves beyond the understanding of bots as problematic actors that meddle in information and communication flows, and instead uses bots for good.

Such bots then become a vehicle for data collection, and fight for transparency in data science. One way of doing …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Bjarki Valtysson, whose focus is on regulating the cultural production of Danish influencers, with a case study of parents and child influencers Jas and Mika, who construct a platforms ecosystem based on perceptions of family life, authenticity, and intimacy, while promoting brands, products, and commercial ventures. This takes place in a legislative grey zone.

These influencers have some 317,000 YouTube subscribers, which has very large by Danish standards; they post long (~25 minutes) videos on YouTube and Instagram every Sunday morning (and their dog has his …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is the great Anja Bechmann, who adds some empirical data on how younger users are actually engaging with social media platforms. The focus here is on Danish users aged 18-35, and on YouTube, and on users with ‘deviant’ personality profiles including extroversion and neuroticism.

This study worked with some 1,000 Danish participants who donated log files of YouTube use and engaged in a 25-minute survey about their usage practices; this enabled the project to examine, for instance, the time spent on the platform at various times in …

And the next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Felix Gaisbauer, whose focus is on the supply of and demand for political content on TikTok. This is often tested here using sockpuppet studies that test what kind of content the TikTok algorithm serves users; here, sockpuppet accounts that displayed a right-leaning accounts have at times been found to receive more recommendations for politically aligned content than right-leaning accounts. This could also simply result if there is more right- than left-leaning account on the platform, though.

This ‘algorithmic supply’ thus intervenes between content supply and …

The final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Cristina Monzer, with a comparison of TikTok aesthetics in political videos between Norway and Romania. The first question, of course, is how we might do this, in practice – there are many new computational tools emerging for this now, but most of these also remain untested to date.

The use of TikTok for political communication is characterised by personalisation, a focus on everydayness, and uneven patterns between politicians of different genders. Politicians must use visual cues in such videos as identity markers that signal alignment with …