[Air-L] tools to extract data from Facebook public pages and open groups

[Jen King]

Tim - it was mentioned to me recently (and I confirmed it today by revisiting old posts that I've cited) that Facebook appears to have removed comments (at least in their original format) from their company blogposts. It looks as if they've been replaced by something called "shares." Uncertain if this is the case on Pages. Further, if you look through Facebook's blog shares you may notice (as I have) that the multitudes of negative comments that used to be in the comments are missing. I've skimmed user comments to the blog posts on a number of occasions as a way to see what issues people are complaining about so their sudden absence is quite noticeable. If anyone knows more about this change I'd love to hear about it, but I mention it in case you are looking at collecting information people say about Facebook - it appears now that some degree of censorship is occurring. (This may not be true when the subject of the comments has nothing to do with Facebook.)

Jen King
UC Berkeley School of Information
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 12:32:21 +0000
> From: "Hale, Timothy M." <TMHALE at PARTNERS.ORG>
> To: "<air-l at listserv.aoir.org>" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: [Air-L] tools to extract data from Facebook public pages and
> 	open	groups
> Message-ID: <6C411200-251A-4571-AF52-277A886A23F8 at partners.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am looking for a tool that will extract content from Facebook public Pages and open Groups. I am not interested in collecting user profile data or conducting any type of network analysis - although tools that can collect additional data that fits my needs might work. Ideally, I am looking for a tool that can collect from specified Pages/Groups the entire set of comments and posts to the Page/Group, and if possible, "Likes" and other forms of user activity.
> 
> I am considering a research project analyzing content of Pages and Groups and would like an alternative to creating PDFs and manually entering data.
> 
> Thanks for your help!
> Tim
> 
> 
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