[Air-L] Ideas? extracting posts and responses from a private Facebook group

[Michael T Zimmer]

Right. Since it is a private group, I’m encourage getting consent of all members, not just the administrators. Plus, the fact that FB makes a private group hard to scrape should set off some research ethics alarms….

-- 
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Associate Professor and PhD Program Director, School of Information Studies
Director, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org


> On Nov 16, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Jorge Luis Salcedo Maldonado <jorgelsalcedo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello,  you can scrape the post but take care of being blocked by
> Facebook,  if it is a massive quantity of data, if you dont have
> programming skills you can use kimono or OutWit pro for this task.
> Also be aware of the legal issues related to analyse private data, you can
> have the administrators authorization but I dont know if the members of the
> group  agree to analyse their post.
> Best regards
> El 16/11/2015 21:21, "Violeta Carrion" <vdcarrion at gmail.com> escribió:
> 
>> If it is private you have no options other than manually.. unless you can
>> write some script in Mozilla which would do the repetitive steps for you.
>> No API will give you anything whose permissions are not public. In fact,
>> even when getting the data from GNIP is not possible.
>> 
>> You would need to be quite creative by using a script that access that data
>> from a browser that you have opened.
>> 
>> On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 1:07 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> Greetings all!
>>> 
>>> I have a colleague with the following query?  Any ideas?
>>> 
>>> I need to find the easiest possible way of extracting posts and
>>> responses from a private Facebook group. I am a member of this group
>>> and  I have permission from the administrators to access the posts for
>>> the purposes of my research. I’ll likely be using NVivo to help
>>> qualitatively analyze the posts. But, since I want to extract about a
>>> year’s worth of posts and responses, and it’s a fairly busy group, to
>>> do this manually is unmanageable.
>>> 
>>> I’m wondering if there’s software out there to help me do this or if
>>> there’s a third-party I might be able to hire to help me with this
>>> work. The problem seems to stem from the fact it’s a private vs. a
>>> public Facebook group.
>>> 
>>> ​Cheerio
>>> Tracey​
>>> 
>>> --
>>> *Tracey P. Lauriault*
>>> 
>>> Assistant Professor
>>> Critical Media Studies and Big Data
>>> Communication Studies
>>> School of Journalism and Communication
>>> Suite 4110, River Building
>>> Carleton University
>>> 1125 Colonel By Drive
>>> Ottawa (ON) K1S 5B6
>>> 
>>> 1-613-520-2600 x7443
>>> Tracey.Lauriault at Carleton.ca
>>> @TraceyLauriault
>>> Skype: Tracey.P.Lauriault
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> Statistical Programmer * violetacarrion.com
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Facebook : groups/statausersgroup/
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/statausersgroup/> */raschmeasurement/
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/raschmeasurement/>  *
>> groups/systatusersgroup/ <
>> https://www.facebook.com/groups/systatusersgroup/>
>> * groups/statsprogresearchdata/
>> <https://www.facebook.com/groups/statsprogresearchdata/>
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