Facebook Makes a Special ‘Researcher API’ for Academic Use

Strange not to have heard it before, but Facebook finally creates a special API for research needs. It’s designed for the academic community to access the big data it collects. The need for a special API was fostered by a chain of scandalous events of recent years. Its launch is scheduled for later in 2021.

As Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, the VP of platform partnerships, explained at the event, Facebook had let thousands of third-party developers access its data, but recently the agreements were reviewed or canceled because of either unfair use or Facebook’s policy that gets more concerned about users’ privacy. 

At the same time, some of these API’s were used by scientists, and, to prevent depriving the researchers of this big data, Facebook decided to release a special API purely for scientific use, not involved in commercial projects and mostly meant for researching social processes via Facebook.

The new upcoming API was announced at the F8 conference. It will provide the researchers with access to Pages, Groups, Events, and post-level U.S. data layers. Little is known about the platform beyond that, and probably many details are not meant for disclosing, given how sensible the matter is.