New Tools to Support Independent Research

Meta Content Library and API tools provide access to near real-time public content from Pages, Posts, Groups and Events on Facebook, as well as from creator and business accounts on Instagram. Details about the content, such as the number of reactions, shares, comments and, for the first time, post view counts are also available. Researchers can search, explore and filter that content on both a graphical User Interface (UI) or through a programmatic API.

Together, these tools provide the most comprehensive access to publicly-available content across Facebook and Instagram of any research tool we have built to date. They also help us meet new regulatory requirements, data-sharing and transparency compliance obligations. Introducing these tools to researchers early in the development process gave us the opportunity to improve them before making them more widely available. We will continue to make improvements as we collect more feedback from researchers.