Unequal data access regimes in social media
Updated: Jul 23
Political Communication Report
The current digital architecture is largely grounded in data regimes, sociotechnical ecosystems that regulate the relationship between digital infrastructures, our online footprint, and private appropriation of public data. Under the current data regime, public social media data is not a freely accessible digital common (Fuster Morell, 2010) but part of broader digital enclosures through which technological corporations extract and fence off commodified data (Andrejevic, 2013). The digital enclosures establish a global hierarchy separating sovereign states that can regulate and enforce new data regimes. This global hierarchy is dependent on the state’s power and corporate influence, and certain states are therefore more vulnerable than others.
The prevailing economic logic of technological corporations led to a continuous deprecation of data access mechanisms. In less than a decade, we witnessed a regressive movement towards data inaccessibility. While previous data regimes contemplated unequal but existing programmatic availability of social media data, the new models significantly foreclosed access. Indeed, after a brief period of “independence by permission” (Wagner, 2023) where platforms dictated which scholars and scholarship could be informed by social media data, the natural corollary of this corporate-controlled data regime materialized as an “APIcalypse” (Bruns, 2019), a deprecation of most forms of programmatic access to data. This represents a threat against scientific research and public oversight.
Meta provides a particularly instructive case for how political communication, platform governance, and regional asymmetries interact. On the user-generated content side, the company’s approach to data transparency illustrates a broader trend from openness to restriction. What began as a relatively permissive developer ecosystem, inviting third parties to build on top of Facebook’s social graph, was progressively curtailed, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal heightened concerns about how extensive third-party access to platform data could be exploited, prompting restrictions that ultimately backfired on independent researchers (Venturini & Rogers, 2019). Since then, Meta has moved first toward stricter API permissions and platform review, and later toward increasingly vetted and platform-controlled research tools. Meta’s previous main interface, CrowdTangle, despite its limitations, still offered journalists and academics relatively flexible access to public content and became a key infrastructure for studying political communication on Facebook and Instagram. Its discontinuation in 2024 and replacement by the more restricted Meta Content Library (MCL) marked a further narrowing of independent access. The MCL operates as a controlled-access research environment whose terms limit researchers’ ability to programmatically and independently extract and analyze structured data. Together with X’s closure of academic access and monetization of its API, this transition has been widely criticized as emblematic of the “post-API” era (Tromble, 2021) in social media research.
How to cite: Rose Marie Santini, Hugo Leal, Adriano Belisario & Bruno Mattos
(2026): Unequal Data Access Regimes in Social Media, Political Communication Report, 33, Universitätsbibliothek Mainz. DOI: 10.25358/openscience-15829.
