What is data donation?
Data donation is a research method where participants voluntarily share their own platform data: the activity export a platform lets a user download of themselves. Instead of scraping public content or querying a platform API, researchers work from the feed a real person was actually served and engaged with.
Why donated feeds?
Platform libraries and API access give you a curated, top-down view. Only a donated feed captures what a real person was actually served and watched.
Platform libraries & API access
Top-down, platform-defined
- Curated and aggregate
- Not the individual's feed
- What the platform chooses to expose
Donated feeds
Bottom-up, participant-defined
- The real "For You" sequence
- Per participant, personalised
- Lived experience, in the wild
What donated data can (and can't) tell us
✓ Great for
- Lived, in-the-wild experience
- How the feed behaves for real people
- Within- and cross-participant comparison
✕ Not for
- Population-level generalisation
- "X% of all users…" claims
- Replacing a representative survey
From donation to finding
The For You Data Hub takes donated feeds and turns them into analysable research data by ingesting, enriching and annotating them automatically.