Social Media Analytics: Boom and Bust?

Meaningful access to social media data for research purposes has declined considerably after the initial boom in social media analytics. This decline is due to a combination of factors: first, platform operators have increasingly realised the commercial value of their data, and reduced free and open access to their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); second, widely publicised cases such as Cambridge Analytica have sensitised users, operators, and regulators to the potential for social media data misuse; and third, this increased concern about user privacy has led to the introduction of stricter data protection regulations and the emergence of popular social media platforms that are private and encrypted by design and provide no API-based data access whatsoever.But this decline comes at a time when concerns about issues such as abuse, hate speech, and ‘fake news’ present compelling cases for greater independent scrutiny of social media platforms and their policies; it is obvious that platforms have downgraded researchers’ data access also in order to protect themselves from such critical analysis. It is therefore important to implement new models for enabling independent, critical, public-interest social media analysis, potentially even against the platform operators’ wishes. This article traces the boom and bust of social media analytics over the past decade, and offers a glimpse of what may come next