The DOI matches its Crossref record; 24 of the 24 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
After the ‘APIcalypse’: social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Citations
Cites
Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks
Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111 · Cited by 3,687
Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election
Grinberg, N., Joseph, K., Friedland, L., Swire-Thompson, B., & Lazer, D. (2019) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aau2706 · Cited by 1,803
Studying Facebook via data extraction: the Netvizz application
Rieder, B. (2013) · Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference · doi:10.1145/2464464.2464475 · Cited by 401
Computational Research in the Post-API Age
Freelon, D. (2018) · Political Communication · doi:10.1080/10584609.2018.1477506 · Cited by 336
Qualitative and Mixed Methods Social Media Research: A Review of the Literature
Snelson, C. L. (2016) · International Journal of Qualitative Methods · doi:10.1177/1609406915624574 · Cited by 295
Programmed method: developing a toolset for capturing and analyzing tweets
Borra, E., & Rieder, B. (2014) · Aslib Journal of Information Management · doi:10.1108/ajim-09-2013-0094 · Cited by 262
A topology of Twitter research: disciplines, methods, and ethics
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A New Model for Industry–Academic Partnerships
King, G., & Persily, N. (2019) · PS Political Science & Politics · doi:10.1017/s1049096519001021 · Cited by 171
Venturini, T., & Rogers, R. (2019) · Digital Journalism · doi:10.1080/21670811.2019.1591927 · Cited by 168
Informed consent and the Facebook emotional manipulation study
Flick, C. (2015) · Research Ethics · doi:10.1177/1747016115599568 · Cited by 130
Cited by
Baumgartner, J., Zannettou, S., Keegan, B., Squire, M., & Blackburn, J. (2020) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7347 · Cited by 881
Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics
Proferes, N., Jones, N., Gilbert, S., Fiesler, C., & Zimmer, M. (2021) · Social Media + Society · doi:10.1177/20563051211019004 · Cited by 537
“Some have suggested that dataset sharing upon request is a good compromise (Fiesler, 2019), and Twitter has dealt with this issue by changing its terms of service so that full JSON data is not allowed to be redistributed, instead, only Tweet IDs can be shared which must then be “rehydrated” (see Summers, 2016/2021).”
BackgroundInfluentialDark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence
Nouwens, M., Liccardi, I., Veale, M., Karger, D., & Kagal, L. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376321 · Cited by 494
Social Media, Echo Chambers, and Political Polarization
Barberá, P. (2020) · Social Media and Democracy · doi:10.1017/9781108890960.004 · Cited by 373
‘Corona? 5G? or both?’: the dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook
Bruns, A., Harrington, S., & Hurcombe, E. (2020) · Media International Australia · doi:10.1177/1329878x20946113 · Cited by 291
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Bruns, A.
- Venue
- Information, Communication & Society
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2019-07-11
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1544-1566
- ISSN
- 1369-118X (ISSN-L)
- 1468-4462
- OpenAlex
- W2956617434
- Cited by
- 403
- References
- 24
- FWCI
- 73.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
