Cullen, Z. N., Ellison, N. B., & Pasquetto, I. V. (2026). Seeing like an API: Platform-mediated research and the politics of access. Big Data & Society, 13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517261461463
Summary
This paper examines how academic researchers accessed, interpreted, and evaluated data through Meta’s CrowdTangle (CT) API before its shutdown, arguing that research APIs are not neutral conduits but active mediators of knowledge production. Drawing on interviews with 20 academic CT users, the authors develop a “Seeing like an API” framework — a deliberate riff on Scott’s “seeing like a state” lineage in STS and critical platform studies — to show how the API’s technical design, governance rules, and surrounding knowledge networks jointly determined what researchers could observe, question, and conclude about platform activity. The central claim is that platform-mediated data access is a fundamentally political matter, structured by power asymmetries that favor the platform over the research community.
Key Contributions
- Introduces the “Seeing like an API” framework for theorizing platform-mediated research access.
- Empirically documents the constraints faced by, and adaptive workarounds developed among, academic users of a now-sunset research tool (CrowdTangle).
- Advances scholarly understanding of the politics of data access in platform research, extending STS traditions to the infrastructure of research APIs.
Methods
- Qualitative interview study with 20 academic users of the CrowdTangle API.
- Development and application of the “Seeing like an API” conceptual framework.
- Analysis of the interplay among three dimensions: technical design, governance rules, and platform-mediated knowledge networks.
Findings
- CrowdTangle’s design and governance shaped the very scope of questions researchers could ask and the conclusions they could draw.
- Participants developed adaptive practices to work around the API’s limitations.
- Knowledge about the API circulated through informal networks, which in turn influenced how researchers interpreted and assessed the data they obtained.
Connections
This paper’s critical, qualitative account of CrowdTangle as a mediating infrastructure complements empirical and infrastructural analyses of the same tool and its successors, notably Rieder2025-ju and Rieder2026-pp on the political economy of platform data access, and Bruns2026-yv on the fallout of CrowdTangle’s shutdown for research. Its framing of platform-controlled data access as a governance and power problem also connects to broader work on data-access regimes and their limits, such as Murtfeldt2025-wu and Davies2026-… — link only Ohme2026-nv and de-Vreese2026-zx insofar as they address researcher access under platform-imposed conditions.