Giglietto, M. T. F. (2025). The State of Social Media Research APIs & Tools in the Digital Service Act Era. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16269197
Summary
Terenzi and Giglietto (2025) survey the shifting landscape of social media research APIs and tools in the wake of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). The piece situates this stocktaking within ongoing debates over researcher access to platform data, asking how the regulatory regime introduced by the DSA — particularly its Article 40 provisions on vetted researcher access — reshapes the practical infrastructure available to scholars studying online platforms. As a landscape assessment, it bridges the policy framing of platform governance with the day-to-day methodological realities of computational social science and digital methods.
Key Contributions
- A stocktaking of the current state of social media research APIs and tooling under the DSA regulatory regime.
- A bridge between policy-level discussion of platform data access and the practical methodological infrastructure researchers actually rely on.
- Implicit mapping of the gap between what the DSA promises in terms of access and what is operationally available to the research community.
Methods
Based on the title and framing, the paper appears to take the form of a landscape review or environmental scan of available APIs, scraping tools, and data access mechanisms, situated against the DSA’s evolving implementation. Specific methodological details are not available from the provided metadata.
Findings
- Specific findings are not available from the provided metadata; the paper signals that the API and tooling environment has been materially reshaped by the DSA era, but concrete results would require the full text.
Connections
This paper sits squarely within the platform-governance-data-access conversation alongside work explicitly interrogating the DSA’s Article 40 and researcher access regime, such as Rieder2025-ju and Rieder2026-pp, and the broader critique of the post-API moment exemplified by Freelon2024-sc and Bruns2025-fz. It also connects to digital-methods-tools efforts to build or document research infrastructure under constrained access conditions, including Bouchaud2026-lr, Ohme2026-nv, and Davis-style tool-oriented assessments like Schulte2026-df and Balluff2026-if. Given Giglietto’s authorship, it also belongs to a continuing line of his work on data access and computational methods, including Giglietto2025-1765bb4f and Giglietto2026-632ef967.