Where Have All the Data Gone? A Critical Reflection on Academic Digital Research in the Post-API Age

Abstract

In the wake of the 2018 Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media companies began restricting academic researchers’ access to the easiest, most reliable means of systematic data collection via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Although these restrictions have been decried widely by digital researchers, in this essay, I argue that relatively little has changed. The underlying relationship between researchers, the platforms, and digital data remains largely the same. The platforms and their APIs have always been proprietary black boxes, never intended for scholarly use. Even when researchers could mine data seemingly endlessly, we rarely knew what type or quality of data were at hand. Moreover, the largesse of the API era allowed many researchers to conduct their work with little regard for the rigor, ethics, or focus on societal value, we should expect from scholarly inquiry. In other words, our digital research processes and output have not always occupied the high ground. Rather than viewing 2018 and Cambridge Analytica as a profound disjuncture and loss, I suggest that digital researchers need to take a more critical look at how our community collected and analyzed data when it still seemed so plentiful, and use these reflections to inform our approaches going forward.