Facebook’s New Academic Research API Opens In Early Access

This week, a handful of academic researcher teams will gain access to a new tool from Facebook designed to aggregate near-universal real-time data on the world’s biggest social network.

When it comes to who gets access to Facebook data and how, they are still feeling reverberations from 2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested the personal data of millions of unaware Facebook users to build detailed profiles on potential voters. The company shut down thousands of APIs in the three years that followed and is only now beginning to restore broad access for academic research.