After the ‘APIcalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research

ABSTRACT

In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, social media platform providers such as Facebook and Twitter have severely restricted access to platform data via their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This has had a particularly critical effect on the ability of social media researchers to investigate phenomena such as abuse, hate speech, trolling, and disinformation campaigns, and to hold the platforms to account for the role that their affordances and policies might play in facilitating such dysfunction. Alternative data access frameworks, such as Facebook’s partnership with the controversial Social Science One initiative, represent an insufficient replacement for fully functional APIs, and the platform providers’ actions in responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal raise suspicions that they have instrumentalised it to actively frustrate critical, independent, public interest scrutiny by scholars. Building on a critical review of Facebook’s public statements through its own platforms and the mainstream media, and of the scholarly responses these have drawn, this article outlines the societal implications of the ‘APIcalypse’, and reviews potential options for scholars in responding to it.

KEYWORDS:

• Cambridge Analytica
• Social Science One
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Application Programming Interface
• social media

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere and LIEF project TrISMA: Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media in Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Prof. Axel Bruns is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019), Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and other books, and a co-editor of Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), Twitter and Society (2014), and other collections. His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing ‘big social data’. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number FT130100703,LE140100148].