The next speaker at the Weizenbaum Conference is the great Jessica Walter, presenting a large data donation study involving YouTube users in Denmark. Such data donations are increasingly prominent in light of the decline of social media data APIs; they are enabled in Europe also by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which enables users to claim a copy of their digital data from the platforms they engage with.
These data packages can then be donated to researchers, and provide considerable detail about user activities and experiences on such platforms; the insights they provide are also skewed somewhat by the type of users who are likely to be willing to donate their data, and complicated by the extent and detail of the activities that such packages contain.
The present study draws on data from some 1,000 Danes that are representative of the Danish population, and covers their YouTube uses; YouTube remains a very central platform for news consumption and video streaming in the Nordic countries, of course, and the data can therefore offer some valuable insights into these patterns.
Data donations are also complicated by the drawn-out process of requesting and downloading YouTube data, however, and the further effort of then uploading the downloaded data package to a secure research site. All of this generates substantial participant drop-outs, unfortunately.
Participants in the study skew somewhat older; there are no gender differences and some variability but no overall trend in education levels. Overall, the challenges of designing and operationalising such data donation processes are considerable, even in a highly digitalised country like Denmark; they may be even greater in other countries.
