After the ‘APIcalypse’

Social media platforms and their fight against critical scholarly research

Bibliographic Data

ID19601475
AuthorsAxel Bruns (0000-0002-3943-133X, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume22
Issue11
Pages1544-1566
Publication date2019-07-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInformation Communication & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-118X • E-ISSN: 1468-4462
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369118x.2019.1637447
OpenAlexW2956617434
LanguageEN
Citations received168
References cited22

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

Affordance · Disinformation · General partnership · Internet privacy · Mainstream · Political science · Public relations · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Social media · Sociology · Computer Science · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Media and Politics

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Open DOISci-HubOpen Access