Is it still possible to scrape data from public facebook pages?

Question

I want to scrape comments from a public facebook page (news network) through the facebook graph api. However it says i need to create a app to do this.

After a bit of research I found out that facebook prohibits web scraping since the cambridge analytica scandal.

Is there still a legal way to scrape data from facebook? Does somebody here have experience he/she can share? Thank you in advance.

I'm guessing that violates their terms of service. Since you must log in to see their web site, I'm guessing your account would get suspended. — Trenton McKinney, Jun 14 '20 at 19:40

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 21 '21 at 18:01

4

I dont know about the legality of scraping facebook, but you can use a library called facebook_scraper

for instance:

from facebook_scraper import get_posts

for post in get_posts(name_of_your_public_group, pages=10):
    print(post['text'],'\n')

Note: working only for public pages

edited Feb 21 '21 at 18:01

DisappointedByUnaccountableMod

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answered Oct 07 '20 at 08:59

YosDos

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 15 '20 at 06:28

It is possible, but you have to create an App and apply for Page Public Content Access: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/features-reference#reference-PAGES_ACCESS

...after that, you can get the feed of a public Page with the /page-id/feed endpoint, with an App Access Token.

Is it still possible to scrape data from public facebook pages?

2 Answers2