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Facebook’s new academic research API opens in early access

November 16, 2021

Facebook’s new academic research API opens in early access

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

When it comes to who gets access to Facebook data and how, the company now known as Meta is still feeling reverberations from 2018’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm gathered the personal data of millions of unaware Facebook users to build detailed profiles on potential voters.

The company shut down lakhs of APIs in the three years that followed and is only now beginning to restore broad access for academic research.

TechCrunch previewed Facebook’s new academic research API and spoke with Facebook Product Manager Kiran Jagadeesh, who spearheaded the project with the Facebook Open Research & Transparency (FORT) team.
“This is just the start,” Jagadeesh told TechCrunch, characterizing the Researcher API as a beta version of the toolkit it eventually hopes to offer. The API, first announced at F8 this year, is Python-based and runs in JupyterLab, an open-source notebook interface.

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