Radical changes in platform and regulatory policy have impacted how researchers collect, analyze, and share social media data. Elon Musk bought Twitter and shut down the academic API. Reddit curtailed large-scale access to its data and then went public. Meta sunset CrowdTangle. The European Union demanded that platforms provide researchers access to data. And yet, social media remains an invaluable resource for science. In this session, we will discuss the legal, ethical, and computation challenges social media data collection, sharing, analysis, and archiving pose. Our speakers/panelists include researchers who have used authorized APIs and other data collection approaches, staff from the Social Media Archive at ICPSR who support users in sharing and reusing data, and platform insiders who are responsible for complying with data sharing regulations.
