Sunday, October 22, 2023

The Post-API Conference:

Social media data acquisition after Twitter

If you use social media data in your research, you’re going to want to listen up, because we’ve reached a crisis point. Digital data access has survived in an uncomfortable and unpredictable flux for years, but the most recent wave of policy changes may well be existential.

Location

Annenberg School of Communication - Room 109

3620 Walnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Recommended nearby hotels

Nearest parking lots are at 119 S 38th St and connected to the Sheraton hotel at 3549 Chestnut St

VIRTUAL PARTICIPATION: Please note that the Post-API Conference will not be recorded, livestreamed, or hybrid. However, we will compile a list of resources discussed at the conference in a wiki which we will post to this site in the coming weeks.

Image credit: Midjourney prompt "Schedule social media"

Schedule

Breakfast will be available starting at 8:30 am

Session 1: Roadblocks and Hurdles

9:05 - 10:30 am

Monitoring Russian propaganda across social media
Joseph Bodnar
Large-scale scraping of multi-modal social media posts
Adnan Hoq
Wrestling with the changing API of social media platforms: The case of Botometer
Kaicheng Yang
Scraping, Storing, and Sharing: Coordinating Best Practices to Save Researchers' Time
Jason Greenfield
When Tweet IDs Became a Dead End: How Can We Responsibly Share Social Media Data in a Post-API World?
Melanie Walsh
The TikTok API & the Mobile-Desktop Data Divide
Parker Bach

Break (15 Minutes)

Session 2: Tools and Projects

10:45 am - 12:15 pm

The National Internet Observatory: Online Trace Data for Scientists
Christo Wilson
From Acquisition to Analysis to Publication: Social Media Archive's Efforts in Data Storage and Access
Alison Sweet
Reconstructing Public Activity on Digital Platforms
Stefan McCabe
Theseus' Instagram data gatherer: lessons in maintaining brittle research methods
Xue Ying Tan
POTATO (the Panel-based Open Term-level Aggregate Twitter Observatory)
Aswath Senthil Kumar
A Modular Software Toolkit to Collect Weibo Data
Dan Dai

Lunch (1 hour)

Optional lunch session: Meta Content Library API Demo and Q&A (12:45 - 1:10) More info on the Meta Content Library here

Session 3: Ethics, Risks and Equity

1:15 to 2:45

When is Scraping Legitimate? Ethical, Legal, Administrative, and Technical considerations
Megan Brown
Developing Capacity for Post-API Research: New Frameworks for Social Media Data Acquisition
Jessica Witte
Risks and Protections for Independent Research by Journalists, Civil Society, and Community Science
Sarah Gilbert
Seeing the impossible: Why we need to dream big and ask students to dream bigger
Kenny Joseph
Academics of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our grant application
s. Rutherford mcewan

Break (15 Minutes)

Session 4: Strategies for Moving Forward

3:00 - 3:45 pm

Towards best practices of data donation: How different study settings impact the collection of digital traces
Felicia Loecherbach
Data Donation on WhatsApp
Kiran Garimella
The Australian Social Data Observatory
Daniel Angus
The Effects of Sustained Exposure to Fact-Checking: An Attempt to Run a Field Experiment on Twitter
Tiago Ventura

Session 5: Policies and Platform Governance

3:45 - 4:30 pm

Platform Data Access under the Digital Services Act: Promises and Limitations
Rebekah Tromble
The Return of the API? The EU’s Digital Services Act as Research Game-Changer for Platform Data Access
Naoise McNally
CrowdTangle is dead, long live to CrowdTangle!
Fabio Giglietto
Advocating for Continued Access to Social Media Data through a Public Health Lens
Keenan Chen

Image credit: The Verge

Context

Consider the following developments from the past 12 months:

Elon Musk has eliminated free access to Twitter’s API, and the only academically useful paid tiers far exceed most researchers’ budgets.

Musk has also demanded that Decahose users delete all Twitter data acquired under previous agreements–whether this demand will be extended to Academic API users is currently unknown.

Reddit has denied access to its API for Pushshift, a popular service used by researchers to collect Reddit data. Popular Reddit app Apollo is facing API charges of $1.7M per month to continue operating.

TikTok released a new API for researchers, which among other things requires them “to regularly refresh TikTok Research API Data at least every fifteen (15) days, and delete data that is not available from the TikTok Research API at the time of each refresh."

Crowdtangle, Meta’s researcher tool for acquiring data from Facebook and Instagram, still exists as of this writing. But rumors of its imminent demise have been reported in multiple reputable outlets.

If your research pipeline has been caught in the crossfire of these and similar developments, this one-day Post-API Conference is for you. We’re looking to convene some of the brightest minds working on these issues across disciplines to help identify the most viable solutions and alternatives.

To encourage informal conversation between participants, the conference will adopt a nontraditional structure. Participants will be organized into four informal plenary panels–two in the morning and two in the afternoon–each of which will begin with a series of four 5-minute lightning talks. However, most of the time will be spent in large-scale moderated discussions between participants and panelists.