Social Media Data and Tools

Download social media data from multiple platforms:

• Dataverse
  • The Dataverse Project is an open source research data repository software. Dataverse includes social media datasets contributed by academic researchers.
• Data for Good at Meta (previously Facebook)
  • The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an open platform for sharing data across crises and organizations. Launched in July 2014, the goal of HDX is to make humanitarian data easy to find and use for analysis. As of April 2023, there are over 200 Meta datasets available. 
• Kaggle 
  • Kaggle includes code and data researchers need for data science work. Kaggle contains over 50,000 public datasets and 400,000 public notebooks for analysis. 
• Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection: SNAP
  • Stanford Network Analysis Platform (SNAP) is a general purpose network analysis and graph mining library. SNAP includes various datasets from multiple social media platforms for network analysis. 

Apply to access social media data for academic research:

• CrowdTangle for Facebook and Instagram
  • Launched in 2019, CrowdTangle partners with researchers and academics to study the spread of public content on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Researchers must apply to be part of CrowdTangle’s Academics & Researchers program to gain access to the CrowdTangle interface and API, as well as training and resources.
• SMILE via Social Media Macroscope
  • Social Media Macroscope is a project by University of Illinois Technology Services and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) with the goal of making social media data, analytics, and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students of all levels of expertise. SMILE is an open-source social media analytics tool that allows researchers to collect and analyze social media data. SMILE can perform functions such as text-preprocessing, phrase mining, sentiment analysis, network analysis, and machine learning text classification.
• Social Media Archive (SOMAR) at ICPSR
  • The Social Media Archive (SOMAR), currently in early stages of development, will provide access to social media data and include a robust set of services, including training in social media data use and learning opportunities. Much of SOMAR's data will be available through restricted use applications and the data will be access through a virtual data enclave.
• Social Science One
  • Social Science One was originally launched to pilot a specific model of industry-academic partnerships, seeking to share Facebook data with academics as a test case. They created and provide academic access to the “Facebook URLs dataset” and streaming APIs on Facebook’s page views and political ads library.
  • Researchers must complete a request for proposal to gain access to their data.