34 - Apps and Their Affordances for Data Investigations

Summary

Abstract

Exploring app–platform relations for data investigations.

Keywords: apps, social media platforms, digital methods, data infrastructures, data journalism, data investigations

Recently, Netvizz, a tool to extract data from Facebook, lost access to Facebook's Page Public Content Access feature. This seems to have terminated the precarious relationship its developer, the digital methods researcher Bernhard Rieder, has maintained with the Facebook API over the past nine years. The end of Netvizz is symptomatic of a larger shift in digital research and investigations where platforms are further restricting data collection through their application programming interfaces (APIs) and developer policies. Even though the actual effectiveness of the Cambridge Analytica methods are questioned (Lomas, 2018; Smout & Busvine, 2018), the scandal prompted a debate on privacy and data protection in social media and in turn Facebook responded by further restricting access to data from their platforms.

Since the initial announcement in March 2018, the staggered implementation of data access restrictions by Facebook within its larger family of apps has made visible the vast network of third-party stakeholders that have come to rely on the platform for a wide variety of purposes. Apps stopped working, advertising targets have been restricted, but the party most severely hit seems to be digital researchers. This is because apps that have data collection as their primary purpose are no longer allowed. Digital researchers resisted these changes (Bruns, 2018) by arguing that they would be to the cost of research in the interest of the public good. The list of references to the Netvizz article (Rieder, 2013) comprise over 450 publications, which in reality easily exceed that amount—just consider the many student research projects making use of the tool. Similarly, an ad hoc inventory by Bechmann of studies that “could not have existed without access to API data” comprises an impressive list of journalism, social science and other digital research publications.

Reflecting on the impact data access restrictions have on digital research, authors have contextualized these developments and periodized the past decade as “API-based research” (Venturini & Rogers, 2019) or “API-related research” (Perriam et al., 2020). These are defined as approaches to digital research based on the extraction of data made available by online platforms through their APIs.