Social media data present valuable means of measuring the public’s awareness of and access to key or trending public health messages and information.

Does your study involve analysis of public health topics communicated through public posts on Facebook or Instagram?

The Meta Content Library and API is a graphical tool and Application Programming Interface (API) for analyzing public posts on Facebook and Instagram. Researchers can use the tool to generate near real-time data about public content on Facebook and Instagram, including the post owner, reactions and shares.

For researchers with coding experience

The Meta Content Library API is designed for computational researchers familiar with R or Python and allows for programmatic querying of Meta’s full public content archive.

Generate an API query in Python or R directly from your search query. Paste the code into the Content Library API to get search results.

Researchers can perform deeper analysis of public content by using Content Library API in Researcher Platform, a “secure digital clean room.”

The Content Library API can search over 100 data fields from Instagram accounts and posts and Facebook pages, posts, groups and events to create 100,000 results per query. Queries can run in the background while a researcher works on other tasks.

Through the Researcher Platform, researchers can access free computation and data analysis, an access-controlled version of JupyterHub, and can export research outputs such as code, figures, tables, graphs and statistics.

For researchers from all backgrounds

For Facebook, use the Meta Content Library to find posts shared to and information about pages, groups and events. For Instagram, find posts shared by and information about business and creator accounts.

Use the Library to sort and filter through public Facebook and Instagram posts, including photos, videos and reels, by language, view count, media type, content producer and more. Customize by content producer lists to refine your search.

Both the Content Library and API are controlled-access environments and do not allow data to be exported to a researcher’s own machine for analysis.

Eligibility

Are you interested in accessing the Meta Content Library? Researchers must be affiliated with a qualified academic institution or qualified research institution. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. With no prior approval required from Meta, researchers can publish and share results and findings of their research.