Navigating the Post-API Dilemma: Search Engine Results Pages Present a Biased View of Social Media Data

Amrit Poudel, Tim Weninger

Keywords: Social Media, Data Access, Bias, Search, Post-API era

Abstract: Recent decisions to discontinue access to social media APIs are beginning to have detrimental effects on Internet research and the field of computational social science as a whole. This lack of access to data has been dubbed the Post-API era of Internet research. Fortunately, popular search engines have the means to crawl, capture, and surface social media data on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) if provided the proper search query, and may provide a solution to this dilemma. In the present work we ask: does SERP provide a complete and unbiased sample of social media data? Is SERP a viable alternative to direct API-access? To answer this question, we perform a comparative analysis between (Google) SERP results and nonsampled data from Reddit and Twitter/X. We find that SERP results are highly biased in favor of popular posts; against political, pornographic, and vulgar posts; are more positive in their sentiment; and have large topical gaps. Overall, we conclude that SERP is not a viable alternative to social media API access.

Track: Social Networks, Social Media, and Society

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Submission Number: 1166