Best Way To Collect Recent Social Media Data For A Research Dataset?

I’m working on a research project and need to build a dataset from recent social media data — mainly text like posts, comments, captions, etc.

I’ve been checking out different platforms and this is what I’ve found so far:

• YouTube → comments are available through the official API
• Reddit → seems possible, but I’m a bit confused about the current access/API situation
• X/Twitter → official access looks paid
• Instagram → came across Apify and a few similar scraping services
• Facebook → same, there are some third-party options

I also checked Apify just to get an idea of the cost. Depending on the platform/actor, it seems to range from relatively cheap to pretty expensive. But I don’t have a fixed dataset size yet, so I’m not really committed to Apify or any particular platform.

Basically, I’m trying to figure out:

• What’s the easiest way to collect recent public data from these platforms?
• Are there any good free/low-cost alternatives?
• Is Apify actually worth using for something like this?
• Are there any APIs/tools/datasets I might be missing?
• If you’ve built a similar dataset recently, what approach did you use?

The data would only be from public sources, and this is for research/academic use.

Would really appreciate some pointers from people who have actually dealt with this recently.