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Social Media Research

Important information to consider when conducting social media research, helpful tools to assist in data collection and analysis, and links to resources on methods, ethics, examples, and more.

Instagram TOS and API

There is an important line: "You can't attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or collecting information in an automated way without our express permission." in Instagram's TOS that effectively bans any scraping.

Meta has previously taken action against high-profile research that violates the TOS, shutting down the accounts used for scraping Facebook by the NYU Ad Observatory in 2021. Similar projects that aim to investigate ad targeting on Facebook from Mozilla and ProPublica have also been shut down. Automated web scraping of Instagram, as well as Facebook, is highly cautioned against for this reason.

Unfortunately, Meta, Instagram's parent company, also keeps the Instagram API tightly locked down. The "graph API" allows hashtag search and the viewing of business account details, but no searching of posts from personal accounts. The CrowdTangle platform, which serves as a sort of advanced API that researchers can apply for, also provides more access to Facebook than it does Instagram.

You can find out more about what the Instagram API can do on the Meta Developers page dedicated to it.

Tools for Instagram research

Because of the tight restrictions on the Instagram API and a TOS ban on scraping, it is very hard to automatically collect data from Instagram in a way that does not violate the TOS.

If your research purposes are served by what the business "graph API" allow and you have an Instagram Business or Creator account, you can make use of tools like the instagrapi Python library to interact with it (requires coding). This is likely not the case for most research projects.

There are a handful of pre-built web scraping packages for Python and R that are specifically designed to collect data from Instagram. There are no tools that can do this without coding knowledge at this time (05/2022). Usage of these tools will violate the TOS on the account you use for the scraping and it may be banned from the platform.

Example publications in Instagram research