Social media companies prevent researchers from studying acts of disconnectivity

What is it about?

This article is about one of the ways that social media companies control the kind of knowledge that researchers (and others) can produce about social media users. Companies like Facebook allow external people access to some of their data using special interfaces called APIs. However, not all data are available through these APIs. In this article we discuss the way that APIs do not enable data to be collected about actions such as unfriending, removing Likes, blocking, and other negative acts. We argue that this creates a bias in the kinds of knowledge that can be produced about social media use, and that this bias is towards the positive and the affirmative.

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Why is it important?

This is important because so much of our social lives is lived through social media, and so knowledge about how we use services such as Facebook is essential for understanding how we live today. If these companies make it difficult to study actions such as unfriending, then we are missing out on knowledge about a widespread social phenomenon.