[Air-L] Text/Data Mining Software Suggestions: for YouTube, Facebook & Instagram?

Tue Nov 10 08:46:35 PST 2020

Dear all,

I am so glad this came up. This topic is widely neglected.
Yes, there are rules to consider if it comes to terms of use, an area which is mostly covered by contract law. Personal data is covered in Eu by GDPR. However, there are also implementation laws for the GDPR which grant exceptions for researchers, journalists and artists. Mostly these address the obligations to inform data subjects.

But this aside, what I find more urgent in the is debate (especially the exchange between Bernhard and Stuart) is the role of universities. I do not think it is desirable that research is stifled, channelled, or limited by platform providers. Not that I argue for violating laws, but I think universities and research associations have so far done little to support researchers in their efforts. European universities have installed DPO's, ethics committees, data management policies and privacy officers to comply with GDPR. However, these efforts do not take into consideration what complying with these rules means for researchers, how much additional hours we spent now on conducting DPIA's, ethical impact assessments, mailing with ethics committees which are solely focused on human subjects and have never dealt with social media data sets, developing data management plans and get DPIA's rejected time and again by anxious DPO's who are not willing or anxious to use the exceptions as formulated in the implementation law of the GDPR.

For us at Utrecht Data School, it means that we work now with a privacy lawyer who guides us through the decision-making process of what to scrape under which conditions, and who assesses our projects for GDPR and contract law compliance. We can do that because we are quite autonomously funded.

But the discussion we should have is:
how are universities and research associations supporting researchers in executing their right to carry our research?
how do research associations and universities address the limitation of research efforts by platform providers or other corporate players?

Best wishes,
mirko

________________________________
From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> on behalf of Brooke Criswell via Air-L <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
Sent: 10 November 2020 17:24
To: Bernhard Rieder <berno.rieder at gmail.com>
Cc: Air-L at listserv.aoir.org <Air-L at listserv.aoir.org>
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Text/Data Mining Software Suggestions: for YouTube, Facebook & Instagram?

I hope this helps guide you as well.

https://research.fb.com/data/

Please check out this link. You can apply for different access to data
based on your research topic. Or you can submit a proposal as an academic.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 10:22 AM Brooke Criswell <bcriswell at email.fielding.edu>
wrote:

> I hope this helps guide you as well.
>
> https://research.fb.com/data/
>
> Please check out this link. You can apply for different access to data
> based on your research topic. Or you can submit a proposal as an academic.
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 9:53 AM Brooke Criswell <
> bcriswell at email.fielding.edu> wrote:
>
>> My apologies. I was just passing along what I have been told because of
>> privacy settings within Facebook and Instagram. I have been told
>> specifically by Facebook there is no "legal" way to scrape comments or
>> different things like that. Now likes and shares etc, I have no idea. So I
>> was just passing that along. I am by no means an expert in all of the ways
>> and was not aware of other ways like Facepager. I just know Facebook is
>> very strict with their data especially because of the privacy policy and
>> settings people can individually make. I have been told Facebook closed off
>> their API except for when working in collaborations or specifically
>> accepted to get data from their research team.
>>
>> Very sorry if I gave wrong information. This is just what I have learned
>> and been told and would never want anyone to get into trouble or collect
>> items they weren't technically supposed to.
>>
>> Best of luck and if you do find anything please share!
>>
>> Take care all.
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 5:35 AM Bernhard Rieder <berno.rieder at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear colleagues,
>>>
>>> I would like to disagree with Brooke here. Facebook data can still be
>>> accessed through non-scraping based API-access, most importantly the
>>> awesome Facepager.
>>>
>>> For Instagram, scraping is indeed the go-to technique (instaloader works
>>> very well) and I would like to defend the idea that ToS should not hinder
>>> researchers if the social relevance of the topic warrants it. Adhering to
>>> corporate policy is not the gold standard for what independent research
>>> should strive for, in my view. Proposing topics to people at Facebook may
>>> be a strategy for certain topics, but for anything that does not fit within
>>> the narrow interests of the platform, this will most likely go nowhere.
>>>
>>> For YouTube, you can also check out the YouTube Data Tools that I have
>>> been maintaining here: https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/
>>>
>>> All the best,
>>> Bernhard
>>>
>>>
>>> > On 10 Nov 2020, at 05:22, Brooke Criswell via Air-L <
>>> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Facebook and Instagram are strict and according to terms and conditions
>>> > they don't allow any data scraping.
>>> >
>>> > Best try is to propose your study to a researcher at Facebook
>>> >
>>> > On Mon, Nov 9, 2020, 2:21 AM Alexandre Leroux <alleroux at ulb.ac.be>
>>> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> Facepager for FB and YT it has a user interface and a decent
>>> documentation.
>>> >>
>>> >> There are scrappers for instagram but those don't comply with the
>>> >> platform terms of use and afaik are terminal only.
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> On 6/11/20 14:59, Cristina Migliaccio wrote:
>>> >>> Dear Colleagues,
>>> >>>
>>> >>> Advance apologies if this question has been addressed (as I am
>>> certain it
>>> >>> has been) in some previous forum/email---does an easy to use
>>> text/data
>>> >>> mining software/platform exist that works across these 3 social media
>>> >>> platforms: YouTube, Facebook & Instagram?
>>> >>>
>>> >>> I would like to collect data on alphabetic features but also
>>> >> paralinguistic
>>> >>> features such as likes, shares, etc.
>>> >>>
>>> >>> Any suggestions whatsoever for a text/data mining beginner would be
>>> >> greatly
>>> >>> appreciated (videos, lectures to this end also appreciated!)
>>> >>>
>>> >>> Warm thanks-
>>> >>> Cristina Migliaccio
>>> >>> _______________________________________________
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>>> >>
>>> >> --
>>> >> Alexandre Leroux
>>> >> Ph.D candidate
>>> >> Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality
>>> (GERME)
>>> >> Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)
>>> >> alleroux at ulb.ac.be
>>> >> _______________________________________________
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