Accessing data about social media platforms for public-interest research
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RESEARCH SYNTHESIS
ODI Research & Development
Last updated: June 2024
This annotated slide deck has been researched and produced by the Open Data Institute (ODI), and published in mid 2024.
It is a summary of one of three research work streams conducted during the ODI’s Global Data Infrastructure project. For further information about the project, the other two work streams and our findings, read the project page here.
The speaker’s notes contain further information and context.
This document is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC-BY-SA).��The research project team members were: Sasha Moriniere, Claudine Tinsman, Sophia Worth, Jared Robert Keller and Gefion Thuermer.
To share feedback by email or to get in touch, contact the Evidence & Foresight programme at, research.team@theodi.org
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
| If you would like to send us feedback, �please get in touch by email at research@theodi.org. |
Contents
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
The importance of access to social media data for public-interest research
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Social media platforms have become crucial spaces where individuals express themselves, share political opinions, mobilise on certain issues, and consume news and information.
To better understand these movements and the role that social media platforms play in their development, researchers must be able to study the platforms and the manner in which users interact with them.
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Social media platforms are crucial to many societal functions
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Accessing data held by social media companies is vital for a wide range of public-interest research, including academic studies, advocacy work, journalistic investigations, and policymaking.
By understanding how to effectively access and utilise social media data, researchers can gain valuable insights and contribute meaningfully to their respective fields and society more broadly.
Accessing social media data is vital to public-interest research…
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ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Despite the important societal functions that these platforms support, they are almost entirely owned and operated by private entities.
Recently, many have begun to roll back access to data that they previously made available for researchers, including X, Meta and Reddit.
… but access is being shut down.
The Online Safety Act (UK), Digital Services Act (EU) and Platform Accountability Act (USA) represent three attempts to facilitate researcher access to vital data held by social media companies.
The scope of access and timeline for enactment all vary, but they are important steps.
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Governments are beginning to mandate access…
The DSA, the first such policy to be enacted, sets out a promising approach.
But gaps and uncertainties remain, which have left researchers and platform representatives (within the EU and beyond) with a lack of clarity about how access will/ should be enabled.
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... but there are still many gaps and uncertainties
Many governments are currently working to draft and ratify similar policies to enable researchers to access social media data, but these are still likely to leave out many researchers.
For instance, researchers in non-covered regions, those investigating non-covered research questions or those outside academia or more formal research organisations.
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... but there are still many gaps and uncertainties
To help address some of these challenges, we have mapped the ways that public-interest researchers can currently access social media data outside of systems mandated by regulation.
Our aim is to provide researchers from different countries and contexts with guidance on how to gain access to social media data in different ways, depending on their circumstances, research questions and needs.
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... but there are still many gaps and uncertainties
Different ways of accessing social media data
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Researchers seeking access to data about social media platforms can generally access data in four ways:
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We have identified four basic ways of accessing social media data
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When weighing the pros/cons of different routes, researchers should reflect on four things:
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Researchers can access data directly from social media companies
This can be via a partnership or through a portal, dashboard, API or Trusted Research Environment set up by the company.
This can support many types of research, but access is tightly controlled by the companies.
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Crowdtangle is an example of a tool for accessing data directly from a social media company
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Researchers can access data directly from the platform/ app
This can take the form of ‘scraping’ or ‘crawling’ data from websites and apps in order to collect data that otherwise is rarely available directly from social media companies.
This comes with legal and ethical uncertainties.
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Beam/ Method 52 is an example of a tool for scraping data directly from a social media website
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Researchers can access data from users of the platform
This approach is often termed ‘data donation’ and involves users consenting to share data about their use of a service with researchers.
This route can provide people with a way of taking part in research, but it can also be difficult achieve the scale of participation necessary for some research.
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PetaBencana is a crowdsourcing tool that enables social media users to share data for public benefit
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Researchers can access data from third parties
The data that these third party platforms, websites and databases make available will have been collected through one of the other three routes
Given this, accessing data from third parties carries with it some of the same legal and ethical uncertainties as the other routes.
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Bright Data is an example of a third party that provides access to data collected from social media companies
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Our WiP register of different approaches to accessing social media data
OUR REGISTER OF APPROACHES AND INITIATIVES
While conducting our research, we developed a register of different initiatives that enable access to social media data
We present it here as a work-in-progress in the hope that it can be of use to researchers exploring their options and weighing the pros/ cons of different approaches.
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The register is structured around a loose typology of different approaches to enabling access
The typology draws on the ODI’s previous work developing the Data Access Map which provides a high-level overview of the landscape of different data access approaches out there.
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
3: OUR WIP REGISTER OF APPROACHES
Approaches contained within the register
The register can be filtered by different important aspects and criteria
In our work, we found it most useful to filter initiatives based on:
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
3: OUR WIP REGISTER OF APPROACHES
The source of the data
It is important to know who has the agency to decide what to share, how and with whom. In the register, the primary ‘sources of data’ are:
The type of sharing/ access
Researchers may want to know when they will be able to actually download the data versus when they will be able to run queries and generate insights but not interact with or download the underlying data.
We welcome any and all help on this journey.
Let us know if you are interested in joining us.
ACCESSING DATA ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Thank you
Get in touch
To learn more about the next steps for our research into global data infrastructure, see our project page
If you would like to talk to us about collaborating, partnering or supporting our work, please get in touch.
research@theodi.org
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