2024
By Felicia Loecherbach & Laura Boeschoten
Messaging services such as WhatsApp potentially play a role for sharing political information via meso-spaces between public and private. However, it is difficult to tell in how far WhatsApp IS being used for news, especially in European contexts since data access so far has been very tedious and poses many privacy-related challenges. Data donation allows researchers to access such otherwise inaccessible data sources. In this project, we combine two existing open-source infrastructures: WhatsApp Explorer to help respondents retrieve their own data and PORT to donate that data to researchers. In a pilot study, we investigate whether and if so which links to news are being shared via WhatsApp.