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

Tue Nov 10 09:19:13 PST 2020

Bernhard,

Do you have any of those court cases you could send links to me? I would
really love to learn more about this subject, especially as an early career
researcher. And are the laws very different in Europe compared to the US?
(I am in the US).

This is all so interesting to me!

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020, 11:11 AM Bernhard Rieder <berno.rieder at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi again,
>
> No need to apologize, Brooke, we are all in a situation that is marred by
> insecurity, opacity, and conflicting information. My apologies if my
> comments came off too strong, also to Stuart.
>
> With regards to Facepager, the tool made it through Facebook's app review
> (Jakob, I'll have to ping you sometime soon to ask how you did it), which
> means that its functionalities were audited by the company, giving some
> legal security. This does of course not eliminate ethical questions.
>
> With regards to Instagram, what baffles me is that scraping via
> instaloader actually works better than data retrieval via the API ever did,
> which means that there is some level of acquiescence. One can easily get up
> to 100s of 1000s of posts for a given hashtag.
>
> What Mirko is saying about university support is super important, but I
> also want to highlight the great work by AlgorithmWatch and colleagues Jef
> Ausloos, Paddy Leerssen and Pim ten Thije on legal frameworks for more
> robust data access, for example here:
> https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/GoverningPlatforms_IViR_study_June2020-AlgorithmWatch-2020-06-24.pdf
>
> This may be naive, but I have the hope that the upcoming EU Digital
> Services Act will have some provisions for academic research, or at least
> some clarifications. The current situation is creating serious chilling
> effects for research, without protecting data subjects from the most
> predatory practices, since scraping works so well (in technical terms) in
> many cases - or not at all in others. Commissioner Vestager has sent some
> positive signals in that direction.
>
> The reason why I am very hesitant about taking ToS as legal gospel is a)
> that courts have ruled otherwise when it comes to scraping and b) because I
> find the idea that platform companies can dictate what we are able to know
> about platforms, how they operate and what happens on them highly
> problematic and worth fighting against. Jeanette Hofmann and I have a paper
> on that front coming forth very soon ,-)
>
> All the best,
> Bernhard
>
>
> > On 10 Nov 2020, at 15:53, 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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