{"id":42670,"date":"2026-09-27T11:27:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T09:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/best-way-to-collect-recent-social-media-data-for-a-research-dataset\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T11:27:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T09:27:04","slug":"best-way-to-collect-recent-social-media-data-for-a-research-dataset","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/best-way-to-collect-recent-social-media-data-for-a-research-dataset\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Way To Collect Recent Social Media Data For A Research Dataset?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- SC_OFF --><\/p>\n<div class=\"md\">\n<p>I\u2019m working on a research project and need to build a dataset from <strong>recent social media data<\/strong> \u2014 mainly text like posts, comments, captions, etc.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been checking out different platforms and this is what I\u2019ve found so far:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>YouTube<\/strong> \u2192 comments are available through the official API<\/li>\n<li><strong>Reddit<\/strong> \u2192 seems possible, but I\u2019m a bit confused about the current access\/API situation<\/li>\n<li><strong>X\/Twitter<\/strong> \u2192 official access looks paid<\/li>\n<li><strong>Instagram<\/strong> \u2192 came across Apify and a few similar scraping services<\/li>\n<li><strong>Facebook<\/strong> \u2192 same, there are some third-party options<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 <strong>I don&#8217;t have a fixed dataset size yet<\/strong>, so I&#8217;m not really committed to Apify or any particular platform.<\/p>\n<p>Basically, I\u2019m trying to figure out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What\u2019s the easiest way to collect <strong>recent public data<\/strong> from these platforms?<\/li>\n<li>Are there any good <strong>free\/low-cost alternatives<\/strong>?<\/li>\n<li>Is Apify actually worth using for something like this?<\/li>\n<li>Are there any APIs\/tools\/datasets I might be missing?<\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;ve built a similar dataset recently, what approach did you use?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The data would only be from <strong>public sources<\/strong>, and this is for research\/academic use.<\/p>\n<p>Would really appreciate some pointers from people who have actually dealt with this recently. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- SC_ON -->   submitted by   <a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/user\/AIMill\"> \/u\/AIMill <\/a> <br \/> <span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/datasets\/comments\/1wrfc3j\/best_way_to_collect_recent_social_media_data_for\/\">[link]<\/a><\/span>   <span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/datasets\/comments\/1wrfc3j\/best_way_to_collect_recent_social_media_data_for\/\">[comments]<\/a><\/span><\/p><div class='watch-action'><div class='watch-position align-right'><div class='action-like'><a class='lbg-style1 like-42670 jlk' href='javascript:void(0)' data-task='like' data-post_id='42670' data-nonce='b9a40cecc8' rel='nofollow'><img class='wti-pixel' src='https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-content\/plugins\/wti-like-post\/images\/pixel.gif' title='Like' \/><span class='lc-42670 lc'>0<\/span><\/a><\/div><\/div> <div class='status-42670 status align-right'><\/div><\/div><div class='wti-clear'><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m working on a research project and need to build a dataset from recent social media data&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-datatards","wpcat-85-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.graviton.at\/letterswaplibrary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}