The next speaker in this Weizenbaum Conference session is Lion Wedel, who begins by highlighting the definitional uncertainties about news and news actors online. This can lead to a misrepresentation of the news and information uses by particular demographic groups, such as young people.
One way to work around this is to focus on the informativeness of sources, rather than a more narrow definition of what is news; but how can this be assessed for a given source? This project worked with participant donations of data download packages from social media platforms, connected with a representative two-wave panel study of German users in August 2024 and February 2025; users were able to donate Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok data packages if they so chose.
The project used some 44 survey items in the first wave, and kept 35 of these in the second wave, that explored the informativeness of specific sources; it found that informativeness perceptions were largely stable over time.
From the survey data, the project constructed several user types with distinct perceptions of informative across the various sources. The next step is now to explore the data donations to see whether these user types also manifest in the content engagement data.
