Beyond Informed Consent: Consumer Data Preferences and the Case for Enforcement-Oriented Transparency

by Prof. Dr. Maximilian Becker & Catalina Goanta (University Siegen, SFB)

How are digitalization and artificial intelligence changing the structures of private law? In this working paper, Maximilian Becker examines the legal challenges posed by digital technologies from the perspective of civil law. The paper analyzes how data-driven systems, algorithmic decision-making processes, and new digital business models are influencing existing structures of private law and explores the extent to which current law can meet the demands of the digital transformation.

→ Link Working Paper

About the Working Paper

Digital markets have fundamentally altered the conditions under which consumers engage with data-driven platforms, yet regulatory frameworks, particularly in the EU, continue to rely on consent-based models that presuppose a level of technological literacy and informed agency that most users do not possess. Drawing on existing empirical evidence from five studies across the US, UK, and EU, this paper departs from the empirical argument that consumer preferences regarding personal data are highly unstable and shaped by framing and trust rather than genuine, well-formed values.

Consumers systematically overestimate the privacy protections offered by paid services, accept personalization without understanding its commercial scope, and disregard privacy notices regardless of their clarity. This argument exposes the structural failure of transparency-as-disclosure as a regulatory strategy: informing consumers better does not fix markets distorted by asymmetric information and complex, layered business models.

Rather than doubling down on consumer-facing transparency obligations, this paper proposes a shift toward enforcement-oriented business-model transparency, under which platforms would be required to disclose aspects such as data flows, monetization strategies, but also algorithmic processes to regulatory authorities and civil society. The Digital Services Act and the General Data Protection Regulation already point somewhat in this direction. Building on this logic, the paper proposes further machine-readable transparency as a complement to existing information obligations.

About the Authors

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Becker is a professor of civil law, intellectual property law, and media law at the University of Siegen. His research focuses on civil law with connections to medical law, data law, and information technology law, as well as on IT law, media law, and competition law. He studied German and European business law at the University of Siegen and earned his doctorate there in 2012 with a dissertation on “Absurd Contracts.” After serving as an assistant professor at the University of Siegen and as a professor of data protection law and IT law at Leibniz University Hannover, he has been a professor at the University of Siegen since 2021. In addition, he is a subproject leader for the project A07 – ‘The Personal Data Industry’ at SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation (University of Siegen). 

Catalina Goanta is an Associate Professor in Private Law and Technology and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, focused on understanding the impact of content monetization on social media and on reinterpreting private law fairness in the context of platform governance. Between 2016-2021 she was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, and during  February 2018 – February 2019, she was a Niels Stensen fellow and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society).  She has been a mercator fellow at the SFB since 2025.

About the Working Paper Series

The Working Paper Series of SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” brings together current contributions from the field of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary media research. The SFB Working Paper Series offers the opportunity for pre-publication and rapid dissemination of research work currently being carried out at the SFB or related to it. The aim of the series is to make SFB research accessible to a broader research community. Publication in the Working Paper Series does not preclude the publication of revised versions of the same contribution in other journals. Contributions from postdocs and established researchers are welcome. The series is intended as a publication forum for the researchers represented in the SFB, their projects, and their ongoing research. Contributions are published in open access and in a limited print edition. If you would like to publish an article in the Working Paper Series, please submit your topic proposal in the form of an abstract (max. 300 words) together with a short CV (max. 50 words). For manuscript submission, please refer to our styleguide.

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – Project number 262513311 – SFB 1187. Editorial responsibility: Karina Kirsten, University of Siegen & SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation.

The SFB cordially invites you to the defense of Niklas Strüver’s doctoral thesis.

Monday, July 27, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. in Room AH-A 217/18.

During the defense, the findings of his dissertation will be presented to the examination committee and academically defended. The title of his dissertation is “Speaking on behalf of the periphery: Third-party relationships in Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem” and it examines the developmental dynamics of the voice assistant Alexa from the perspectives of infrastructure and platform theory. Drawing on the four articles presented, the dissertation explores how Alexa functions as an infrastructure and platform for third-party providers in business and academia, and what sociotechnical power imbalances arise in the process. This analysis allows for an examination of the social relationships that Amazon, as the manufacturer, enters into with complementary providers on the periphery of the platform. Through various empirical approaches, it is possible, despite the usual secrecy maintained by large corporations, to gain insight into the development of technologies that are present in the everyday lives of many people.

It will be conducted in German and supervised by the two examiners, Dagmar Hoffmann and Armin Beverungen.

Niklas Strüver (M.A.) ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Projekt B06 („Un/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion“) und Doktorand am SFB 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“. Er studierte Soziologie mit einem Schwerpunkt auf Techniksoziologie an der RWTH Aachen und schloss dort den Master of Arts ab. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen u.a. in den Bereichen Techniksoziologie, Science and Technology Studies sowie Platform Studies.

The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical and climate catastrophes, anti-democratic backlashes and the rise of authoritarian regimes—all of which are phenomena closely intertwined with increasing datafication, generative AI developments, and the growing power of Big Tech. 

→ Check out the program and register now

Around the world, we find ourselves confronted with these complex entanglements, whose environmental, political and societal costs are distributed unevenly. While digital technologies enable new forms of cooperation, their energy consumption also contributes to environmental disasters. At the same time, it is precisely these digital technologies and infrastructures that are increasingly becoming sites of violence, from algorithmic discrimination to gendered and racialized forms of harassment and disinformation. 

Against this backdrop, the annual conference examines how cooperation is being reshaped in today’s sociotechnical environments. It explores how various alliances—between states and Big Tech companies on the one hand, and between researchers, activists, artists, and communities on the other—negotiate the possibilities and limits of public action and perception. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of control and how are they challenged via digital protests or anti-tech initiatives? And how can cooperative practices and protests also enable resistance and democratic engagement?

Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers and journalists, the conference invites participants to inquire into the politics of media, data, and sensory practices, and to explore the role of cooperative forms of sensing and sense-making.

The conference is organized around three key thematic areas:

Area 1: Digital Power and Techfascism
In this section, we examine emerging alliances between governments, technology corporations, and far-right digital cultures. It focuses on current formations of violence and power: the cooperation between governments and Big Tech on the one hand, and the rise of the global far-right enabled by deregulated social networks on the other. Topics include digital violence, disinformation campaigns, the affective politics of online communities, techfascisms, and debates around digital sovereignty.

Area 2: Sensory Conflicts and Mediated Wars
This area explores how contemporary conflicts, from wars to geopolitical tensions, are experienced, mediated, and interpreted through digital technologies. It addresses major geopolitical and media-technological shifts, including the digitally mediated forms of witnessing wars and conflicts, as well as the fundamental expropriations of land, water, and resources underpinning digital media, which become visible through practices of extractivism, and the sensory confusion produced by disinformation and generative AI.

Area 3: Resistance, Cooperation and Democratic Practices
Alongside critical diagnoses discussed in the other two areas, this part of the program highlights practices of resistance and democratic engagement from activist research and digital anti-facist initiatives. The third section therefore explores interventions in the radicalization and fascistization of societies, how scholars and universities can act together with civil society to counter anti-democratic processes in which Big Tech and other corporations are actively implicated. 

As part of the annual conference, Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz will deliver his farewell lecture, which will include a laudatory address by Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser. The farewell ceremony will be held in German.

Venue

University of Siegen
Campus Unteres Schloss
US-S 001 / 002
Obergraben 25
57072 Siegen

We are delighted to announce the programme for the forthcoming Autumn School, Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI, taking place at the University of Siegen, 22–25 September.

→ check out the program

→ Register here 

The programme is organised around three themes: AI Slop / Slopification (Day 1), Chatbot / Appification (Day 2), and Persona / Affective Infrastructure (Day 3), featuring presentations by Stijn Peeters, Marloes Geboers, Salvatore Romano, Carine Roos, Giorgia Arbuti, Natalia Stanusch, Tanja Sihvonen, Jimmy Mäkelä, Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Nuppu Pelevina, Lilli Sihvonen, Elena Pilipets, and Marcus Bösch.

The three themes are brought into conversation through keynotes by Gabriele De Seta, Esther Weltevrede, Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt, and Carolin Gerlitz, followed by collaborative method-mapping workshops in breakout groups supported by data designers Ángeles Briones and Riccardo Ventura.

Reflecting on synthetic/human-machine co-created data, participants will brainstorm ways to combine different methodological pathways, analytical techniques, and research tools to study platform-embedded AI through qualitative inquiry and critical technical practice. The workshops integrate hands-on data exploration and visual mapping on Miro boards, using methodological prototyping as a mode of inquiry. Each workshop is tailored to the day’s theme, exploring questions of field access/data collection, research tool inscriptions, sense-making/sensing, methodological frictions, and the ethical challenges posed by synthetic data and AI-mediated environments. The specific affordances of the media phenomena at hand are central. Our main interest is to explore how these affordances inform the method(s).

The Autumn School concludes (on Day 4) with a collective reflection on the outcomes of the method mapping workshops, bringing together the insights and questions that emerged over the course of the programme.

Venue

Universität Siegen | Campus Herrengarten 

AH-A 217/18 | Herrengarten 3 | 57072 Siegen

In an interview with the Institute for Network Cultures, Sebastian Gießmann, PI of A01: History of Digitally Networked Media between Specialization and Universalization, answers questions about his newly published book on credit cards and discusses the theory of digital payments.

→ You can read the interview here (in German)

The project B09, “Bicycle Media: Collaborative Mobility Media,” led by Julia Bee, has recently set up a Wikipedia account, on which they have now published an article about bicycle feminism.

→ read the article

Extract from the article

“Bicycle feminism refers to feminist perspectives on bicycle mobility, transportation infrastructure, and bicycle culture. Bicycle feminist perspectives view the bicycle and cycling as a means of feminist self-empowerment. They focus in particular on gender-specific experiences related to issues of safety and freedom of movement in road traffic, as well as the historical overlap between bicycles (and cycling) and feminism.”

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, we recommend attending the project’s annual conference on September 17 and 18 in Bochum. More information can be found here.

Successful habilitation and inaugural lecture at the University of Cologne

In addition to his recently published and critically acclaimed work Das Kreditkarten-Buch (2026), Sebastian Gießmann’s publications include his earlier book Netze und Netzwerke from 2015, which has been translated and published in 2024 as The Connectivity of Things. Furthermore, as part of his habilitation process, he will now deliver his public inaugral lecture at the University of Cologne. All interested parties are cordially invited to attend.

The lecture is titled: “Anthropic Studies: Media Cultures under the Conditions of Artificial Intelligence”

About the lecture

The introductory lecture proposes, through the lens of Anthropic Studies, a situated examination of current, neo-connectivist artificial intelligence. It adopts a symmetrical perspective that draws on both media and cultural studies as well as Science and Technology Studies. The works of Susan Leigh Star and Phil Agre serve as theoretical reference points here. Isn’t “AI” the most ambiguous borderline object that computer science has ever produced? If we are to survive the current super-controversy surrounding AI and its planetary consequences, we must first situate the technology within its institutional ecologies and grammars of trade. Enter the scene: Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic. The prompt for the lecture is: “Tell us a little about your state of mind, Claude.”

June 10, 2026, 4:00 p.m. (s.t.)

University of Cologne
Faculty of Philosophy
Seminar Building (106), 1st Floor, Room S11
Universitätsstr. 37, 50931 Cologne

As part of this year’s Spring School, students, civil society representatives, and scholars worked together for two and a half days to explore conflicts surrounding the topic of extractivism using creative methods such as waterscaping, collages, and mapping. In addition to local extraction sites and stories from the Ruhr region, this year’s event addressed international extraction regions and practices “above and below ground.” Understood as a system of exploitation, extractivism leaves the Earth with no means of regeneration and brings with it social upheaval and conflicts, including human rights violations. Extractivism is one of the greatest transformers of the Earth through mining, but also through extractive infrastructure. Extractivism is also largely responsible for the climate crisis. A focus was placed on developments in the field of artificial intelligence, which will massively exacerbate the consequences of extraction in the future.

Extractivism and AI

The presentations by international guests focused on fossil fuels, which still shape the Ruhr region today—but also on minerals and rare earths used in digital technologies. In addition to rare earths for batteries, chips, and other devices, the discussion also critically examined AI infrastructure, such as data centers. Due to the implementation of AI bots and geopolitical conflicts worldwide, AI is an urgent issue not only socially but also ecologically. The enormous consumption of water and energy by the data centers that form the basis of artificial intelligence, as well as the contested minerals required to manufacture the necessary computing chips, make AI one of the fastest-growing consumers of resources worldwide. Speakers and participants critically discussed both the perspective of global extractivism and the local impacts of such tech infrastructures. Data centers, which have a massive impact on water consumption, and so-called click-work centers, where content moderation, data labeling, and other low-paid tasks are carried out, are often outsourced to the Global South, but can also be found in Germany and the Ruhr region. Globally, they contribute to local extractive structures. Postcolonial and feminist perspectives on mining, labor, resources, and sacrifice zones are therefore indispensable for understanding the issue of extractivism through AI infrastructure.

Through this broad perspective on the practices of extractivism, the many social sectors affected by the consequences of extractivism were able to be connected with one another in the workshops. Media studies, through this climate-just and extractivism-critical perspective, is also brought back to its material foundations in the sense of the media geology of theorist Jussi Parikka (see also Noam Gramlich’s work on this).

The first evening opened with an introduction to the topic of extractivism and media, followed by three keynote speeches and a panel discussion on the topics of “Revier Noir” by Frederike Lange from the German Mining Museum, “Queerness in Historical Mining between the Ruhr Region and Upper Silesia” by Bochum-based artist Julia Nitzschke, and “Air and Extractivism” by cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Marietta Kesting. In the subsequent panel discussion with the speakers, moderated by media scholar Oliver Leistert, the focus was on the damage caused by data centers, for example, and on how local populations—such as those in the U.S.—are already fighting back against them today.

On the second day, the program continued with hands-on practical workshops: one on the Emscher River led by Natalie Pielok; one on film and climate catastrophe led by Matthias Grotkopp and Maike Reinerth; one on waterscaping led by Rémi Willemin and Alisa Kronberger; and one on the infrastructures of extractivism led by Petra Löffler, Marlene Helling, and Jakob Claus. It became clear in many presentations that extractivism entails long-term costs that still require complex solutions in the Ruhr region as well, such as the disposal of toxic mining residues or the long-term pumping of water from former coal mines.

In addition to academic contributions, artistic explorations were also central, such as in Azadeh Ganjeh’s lecture-performance on gold extractivism and the associated social conflicts as well as political (online) protests in Iran. A photo exhibition in the Quartiershalle by Sara Bahadori raised participants’ awareness of exclusion and marginalization within the climate movement. In a workshop on the “white gaze” on climate issues, the speaker explored the topic in greater depth with a critical and reflective approach.

Impressions from the Spring School

Around 100 participants actively took part in workshops on water, AI, and mining history, as well as in a decolonial city tour of Bochum, led by Marie Sprenger and Florian Trompke. Finally, in a workshop on climate-just teaching on Sunday morning, faculty and students developed content and methods for a future inter-university curriculum on the topic.

The Spring School is an event of the “Public Sphere” project within the SFB Media of Cooperation and creates a public sphere comprising artists, scholars, journalists, and engaged civil society around the contentious issue of the climate catastrophe.

The third Spring School of the MediaClimateJustice working group was organized by Julia Bee, Gerko Egert, Alisa Kronberger, and Julia Reinermann and was made possible, among other things, through funding from the SFB Medien der Kooperation and Ruhr University Bochum. The goal of the Spring Schools on Media and Climate is to anchor the topic of climate more firmly in media studies and society.

The two-day online conference and data sprint “Witnessing and Justice in Data-Based Research” took place on 31 March and 1 April 2026, bringing together scholars, archivists, journalists and civil society actors, among them war crime documentors and OSINT communities. Organised as part of an ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina/CRC “Media of Cooperation”), the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History, Lviv), and the School of Communications/Conflict Institute (Dublin City University), the event reflected upon the practices and limits of war-related research based on digital, archived and other types of data.

The urgent question at the center of the event was how to address the ongoing tension between data-based research of war and the injustices that persist. Despite the large volume of data documenting Russia’s war in Ukraine, the destruction and attacks against Ukraine continue. Despite the limits of research, OSINT, investigative journalism, and other interventions, data-based investigations using “data for the good” (cf. Williams, 2022; Kazansky et al., 2019) can form a small part of achieving transitional justice and maintain hope and demand accountability by using digitally derived evidence of war injustices and crimes.

DAY 1, 31.03.2026

Lessons from an emergency archive: Telegram Archive of the War 

The conference was opened on the morning of 31 March with a public keynote lecture by Oksana Avramenko (Center for Urban History, Lviv), moderated by Prof. Dr. Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University). Titled “Granting Access to War: Ethics and Accountability in the TG Archive”, Avramenko’s talk addressed the ethical implications of making Telegram data in the war context accessible for research through the Telegram Archive of the War (TG Archive) while safeguarding sensitive personal data of civilian war witnesses.

A central concern was the extensive scope of personal data involved: the archive currently holds approximately two million user IDs, necessitating a tiered classification system that distinguishes between moderately sensitive, sensitive, and highly sensitive content. This framework reflects the serious responsibility the Archive carries toward the civilians whose data has been preserved. Oksana Avramenko also drew attention to findings from CRESE research, which indicate that Telegram-sourced material has been used in only 0.002% of cases before the International Criminal Court, raising important questions about the gap between the volume of documentation being preserved and its current utility in formal accountability processes. Insights during the discussion addressed what the team of the TG Archive would have done differently if the circumstances had allowed: Due to wartime and platform-based conditions, the Archive could not meet the conventional standard of informed consent, such as contacting channel administrators before archiving their content. Oksana Avramenko framed this as a fundamental tension between the imperative to preserve a historic record and the lived reality of those still experiencing the war being documented. 

Imaginations of War Witnessing

The keynote was followed by the roundtable “Limits of War Witnessing”, moderated by Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina). During the talk, five practitioners working across investigative and data journalism, film and memory studies – Jelnar Ahmad (Syrian Archive Programme Manager at Mnemonic), Karina Buhaichenko (investigative journalist at Slidstvo.info), Yevheniia Drozdova (data journalist at Texty.org.ua), Oleksiy Radynski (filmmaker and co-founder of Kinotron Group), and Bohdan Shumylovych (Associate professor at Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv) – discussed the experiential and political limitations of digital war witnessing contributors.

Jelnar Ahmad, representing the Syrian Archive, emphasized the complementary nature of digital documentation, where each collected source represents only a piece of the larger puzzle, raising questions about whether all perspectives are captured, and what consent means in contexts where safety concerns, such as the need to withhold geocoordinates, preclude direct engagement with witnesses. Karina Buhaichenko from the investigative outlet Slidstvo.info drew attention to the politics of visibility, arguing that systematic violence is often the least visible, and explored the tensions between documenting and protecting, as well as between maintaining public attention and the moral exhaustion that comes when witnessing becomes routine. Yevheniia Drozdova from Texty.org.ua noted that despite this being one of the best-documented wars in history, justice has not followed, in part because data journalism operates in a severely constrained environment where security considerations keep many registers closed. She advocated for publishing findings based on transparent estimation instead of silence and called for greater collaboration between organisations whose work or topics frequently overlap. Oleksiy Radynski (co-founder of Kinotron Group), spoke about working with the same body of data as his fellow contributors but repurposing it to research nuclear terror and occupation by making sense of thousands of hours of CCTV footage. He argued that unedited, uninterrupted raw material best exposes what he called “the everyday banality of the Russian war machine”, and that filmmaking in this context becomes an innovative form of resistance. Bohdan Shumylovych (Ukrainian Catholic University) presented a non-conventional approach to war documentation through the collection of dreams, drawing on the concept of “egodocuments” to argue that personal narratives are intimately connected to time, temporality, and social tension; he also reflected on the possibilities and dangers of feeding such material into AI systems, where lived experience risks becoming sensationalized.

The subsequent discussion explored the productive opacity of certain documentation practices, such as deliberate choices about safety and not fully disclosing collected material, the cross-contextual connections between the Syrian and Ukrainian cases, and the question of timeliness, when investigations can generate public discussion even if structural change remains slow. Participants also reflected on the different scales of public engagement and the role citizens play as active participants in the larger witnessing process.

Researching War through Telegram Data: Summary of the data sprint 

The first conference day concluded with a half-day data sprint in the afternoon of 31 March, during which participants from the previous data sprint „War Sensing Through The Telegram Archive of The War“ in September 2025 discussed their ongoing engagement with the Telegram Archive’s data. 

The data sprint session revisited key questions appearing since the last data sprint, including the outcomes and continuation of the research collaborations, their future plans, the role of the Telegram Archive of the War, and the related ethical and practical challenges encountered during the research process. Facilitated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina) and Oksana Avramenko (Center for Urban History, Lviv), the session featured presentations by three groups. 

Group 1 (Trustworthiness of OSI(NT) Outputs) 

Group 1 centred on the challenge of distinguishing between different types of open-source intelligence outputs, namely OSINT, OSINV, OSINF, and Grey OSINT and how they appear specifically in the context of Telegram as a platform and the TG Archive as a research resource. 

A key conceptual move in this group project was reframing OSINT as a process rather than a product or entity, which complicated the classification of Telegram posts such as satire or purely descriptive posts, and foregrounded the importance of localised, contextual knowledge during the ongoing war. Military slang such as “mangal”, which is a term used for a  makeshift protective structure fitted to tanks (as well as a portable grill), illustrate how much understanding can hinge on terms that are invisible to keyword-based search. Here the group throughout their research process noted that not everyone possesses the linguistic and contextual competencies required to conduct, but also assess OSINT content responsibly. As a side project, the project group started mapping the OSINT landscape and its community vernacular on Telegram to address the persistent challenge of contextual knowledge during war. 

The group also grappled with the platform’s technical specificities within their own research process, including the distinction between archived comments, the differentiation between public channels and private chats and the need for desktop access to be able to fully evaluate a message. A recurring theme was the insufficiency of open-source digitally derived evidence isolated from Telegram, highlighting the need for cross-referencing and corroboration with other sources. Looking ahead, the group is working towards a renewed version of the Amsterdam Matrix for classifying OSINT outputs with a focus on Telegram during Russia’s war against Ukraine. There are also ideas to integrate the new framework into the TG Archive interface to guide future users in assessing the trustworthiness of OSI(NT) outputs. 

Group 2 (Sabotage on Telegram) 

Group 2 analysed Telegram practices of grassroots sabotage groups in Russia’s war against Ukraine, choosing to focus on the concept of sabotage as resistance in the context of the war. They explore the representation and practices of sabotage actors through digital ethnographic data collection and qualitative content analysis of three pre-selected channels across two stages: the initial phase following the full-scale invasion (after 24.02.2022) and the established phase (after the liberation of Kherson). Using Google Sheets, the group documented their observation by recording only interpretations and selected phrases from TG Archive data, to minimise and essentially avoid sensitive data sharing with third party platforms, which forms the core of a collaborative paper. They require continuous access to the TG Archive and plan to present results at international conferences.  

Key challenges included the archive’s data limits (only until June 2023), leading the group to focus on early group establishment and key dates in the early stages of the war. Ethical constraints on exporting data were addressed through rich-text coding while avoiding sensitive details. The limits of the translation tool that is embedded in the TG Archive and does not share the data with third party platforms were mitigated via double and triple coding, discussing metaphorical language (e.g., “going for a walk” as a form of resistance/protest), and regular exchange meetings.

As the war is ongoing, the group anonymizes channel and group titles to avoid harming participants in occupied Ukrainian territories and in Russia involved in partisan activities. To prevent adversarial learning, for example through making strategic information on sabotage organization potentially available to Russian security services, the project team chose to describe groups in an abstract manner and their practices in general terms. Central questions in this research project included how sabotage actors describe their own actions, and the issue of research extractivism if/when getting in contact with investigated groups. Currently, the group is finalising their literature review and structuring analysis results.

Group 3 (Everyday War Witnessing: Witnessing the Outbreak of the War through Urban Chats) 

Group 3 examined how the outbreak of the full-scale invasion became witnessable through Telegram, focusing on urban chats from 24 February 2022. The group employs a methodology combining distant reading, by focusing on words that appear most common with close reading of the context for topic identification, followed by merging selected quotes and visualising them through colour-coded topics. The current aim of this research group is to test this methodology—checking for important missing elements—and to visualise topics of each chat separately.

Using the TG Archive as the data source for the project, messages, publication times, and chat names were collected from the archive and used for collaborative analysis, such as Google Collaboratory. Challenges include the subjectivity of defining topics, and decisions about visualisation methods. A data-related question the group faces is whether chat names should be published in the final work.

Outlook and Future for Working with the TG Archive

The data sprint session concluded with an outlook about future steps for working with the TG Archive. A central topic was developing clear citation guidelines, such as mentioning the Archive name, message ID, channel/chat ID, timestamp and guidelines on how to seed the archive, the ethical handling of anonymised data, and proper visualisation practices. Questions regarding the further development of the TG Archive revolved around quotes creation and management for collaborative work with CSV export and assigned tags, as well as the creation of a thematic collections registry on the website of the TG Archive that follows a transparent categorisation logic. 

Open ethical challenges addressed the technical feasibility of obtaining consent from channel administrators or participants due to the scale and urgency of data collection. Debates of the group discussion centered on obtaining consent after the fact, such as contacting channel administrators, which is potentially dependent on channel status following the “situational ethics” approach as advocated by the Association of Internet Researchers. Moreover, the usage of third party services, including LLMs, presents another ethical tension, as the current user agreement prohibits the usage of such services, although local models that don’t share data might be ethically feasible. Additional questions included best practices for user agreements to mitigate data breaches and further consultation with other civil archiving initiatives such as the Syrian Archive. 

DAY 2, 01.04.2026

Justice through Digital Data

The second day started off with a public session in the afternoon of 1 April, beginning with the roundtable “Digital Justice and Accountability”, moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina). The roundtable started off with practitioner perspectives of Jenna Dolecek (OSINT for Ukraine) and Maryna Slobodyanuk (Truth Hounds), both of whom are involved in documenting and investigating war crimes during the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Their presentations were followed by Kaja Kowalczewska (Digital Justice Center, University of Wrocław/Queen’s University Belfast) who researches the role of civil society organisations in accountability processes, in particular on how digital data collected by CSOs can be responsibly transferred into prosecutorial and investigative contexts. 

Jenna Dolecek spoke from the perspective of rapid-response verification, noting that physical investigators typically arrive only after an attack has taken place, which means that digital evidence often precedes and shapes what is later examined on the ground. Yet despite this, none of the cases she presented have so far appeared in court. Rather than framing this as a failure, she approached it as a shared learning process across the field. Maryna Slobodyanuk observed that while the war is in many ways being recorded automatically, a significant gap persists between documentation and justice: the evidentiary requirements of court proceedings are stringent, the Ukrainian legal system is still adapting to the realities of digital evidence, and the data itself remains fragile and fragmented. She also flagged the ethical risks of relying on data derived from hacked or otherwise non-public sources as legal evidence, as well as the persistent practical challenge of accessing war crime scenes. Kaja Kowalczewska brought in a research perspective, arguing that digitalisation has prompted a democratisation of accountability processes by granting access to non-state actors who lack the institutional knowledge and resources of traditional investigative bodies. She emphasised that the key measure of success is not the volume of material collected, but whether the system as a whole can responsibly navigate that material into prosecutorial contexts. 

In the subsequent discussion, Kowalczewska stressed “the importance of coordination more than lack of civil journalism/data,” highlighting success stories of coordination architecture. The conversation also addressed the challenges of fake materials requiring extensive verification time, with AI framed not as black and white but as a tool supporting active human analysis. Questions from the audience raised the role that local communities can and should play in data-based investigations, pointing to an ongoing tension of visibility between centralised expertise and grassroots knowledge.

Capturing Cultural Resistance as Less Documented War Witnessing

The public conference programme concluded with a film screening of “A Home for Rita” (directed by Yulia Appen, 2025). The documentary film follows a Roma family that had to flee the Russian occupation in spring 2022, focusing in particular on the direct experiences of Roma women during the war, their stories and their playful imagination. Set in the city of Zaporizhzhia, just 40 kilometres from the frontline, the narrative centers around the housing problem for displaced Roma people, and their search for a home and a sense of belonging. At the same time, the movie documents the reflections of the Roma people on Ukraine and their own complex identity during the full-scale invasion and in the context of the resistance to Russian aggression.

The screening was followed by a Q&A with director Yulia Appen and Sashko Protyah from Freefilmers, moderated by Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė. The director Appen answered questions from the audience, describing the process of establishing contact with the Roma families, as well as the ethical implications of her position as an external individual producing a documentary film about a marginalized community, her approach of continuously giving back to the community and especially supporting the family in relocating. 

A word of thanks from the organizers

The format of the online conference and data sprint around the Telegram Archive of the War once again provided a space to carry out hands-on data research and to discuss the intersection of different methodological approaches and ethical challenges, drawing on specific thematic and temporal contexts. Beyond the specific findings of each working group and roundtable contribution, this year’s programme highlighted the tension between the extensive documentation of the war, digital data-based witnessing and ongoing injustices through the ongoing attack on Ukraine. Participants emphasized that open-source digitally derived evidence from the TG Archive cannot stand alone, but requires cross-referencing and also effective coordination and collaboration efforts to ensure that those involved do not duplicate their work. In times of ongoing war in Ukraine and thus in Europe, where Russia’s continued bombardment makes travel to and from Ukraine — and thus collaborative research in a shared physical space — extremely difficult, this online format has proven a meaningful way to sustain research engagement with issues that are urgent for participants from both academia and different realms of practice. As organisers, we want to thank everyone who joined this year’s conference and data sprint for their continued collaboration, openness, and mutual support.

On behalf of the CRC Media of Cooperation and the project teams “War Sensing” (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) with Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė, Johanna Hiebl and Gregor Wörl, the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History, Lviv) with Oksana Avramenko and Maryana Mazurak and School of Communications/Conflict Institute (Dublin City University) with Prof. Dr. Tanya Lokot