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

Fri Nov 20 10:02:33 PST 2015

This post raises a good ethics debate. If I'm a member of a private group
on Facebook, I don't think the admins have the authority to give someone
permission to scrap data in my name. And honestly, I'd be pretty offended
if they did, I might still want to object to that. In essence, my own
personal view it that's it's unethical to scrap data off a private group
unless every single member gives permission for me to do so.

Best regards.
Rasha

Rasha A. Abdulla, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Past Chair
Journalism and Mass Communication
The American University in Cairo
www.rashaabdulla.com
Twitter: @RashaAbdulla
<http://twitter.com/rashaabdulla>

On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 12:01 AM, Michael T Zimmer <zimmerm at uwm.edu> wrote:

> 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
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> >>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> >>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> >>> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
> >>>
> >>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> >>> http://www.aoir.org/
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> 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/>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> >> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> >> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> >> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
> >>
> >> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> >> http://www.aoir.org/
> > _______________________________________________
> > The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> > is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> > Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
> >
> > Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> > http://www.aoir.org/
>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>