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The final session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in the embedding of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles into data donation procsses. Data donation approaches are still not very standardised, and highly study-specific; this is not necessarily the best approach, and more standardisation of approaches and tools could help embed FAIR principles here.

The RIGHTS project in the Netherlands seeks to advance these ideas by developing standards and templates for researchers, data stewards and ethics review boards, and policy-makers at research institutions, while building on existing data …

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 Daria Szafran, whose focus is on the impacts of Instagram use on body image. Body image covers the entirety of a person’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about their body, and since the emergence of social media there have been concerns about the impact of visual social media apps on such perceptions.

There are many cross-sectional and experimental studies on such impacts, but many of them are based on small and selective samples involving homogenous user groups, and Instagram usage measurements are often …

The next speaker in this morning session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Joanna Strycharz, whose interest is in the connection between data donations and platform ad libraries. Personalised advertising on digital media platforms remains difficult to study, precisely because of the personalised and embedded nature of this advertising and the great diversity in ads run even by the same advertiser. Data available to researchers remain poor.

Various approaches for studying this include self-reporting, experiments, platform ad libraries, and tracking plug-ins, but none of these provide a complete user-level perspective on advertising. Data donations …

The second day at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Rianne Nienke Visscher, whose focus is on the consistence of the digital download packages used in data donation projects. This emerges from the WHAT-IF project, which aims to create a digital twin of the digital political information environment across a number of European projects. Very quickly, this project found that the data structures across individual donations were often slightly different.

This pointed the project to issues with the completeness, structure, changeability, and measurement of variables in data download packages. Such variations apply within platforms …

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 …

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 …

I’m chairing the final paper session for today at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, which starts with Hekmat Alrouh; his interest is in the study of grocery shopping behaviours in Dutch supermarkets, and this will involve data donations of loyalty card information.

To test this idea, he began with a GDPR request to two supermarkets for his own shopping data; those data packages arrived two weeks later, but they looked very different from what he could see on his loyalty apps. He then contacted the higher-level executives in these corporations directly, by guessing their email …

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 …