In July 2014, a team of four Swedish and Polish researchers began using an automated program to better understand what people posted on Facebook.
The program, known as a “scraper,†let the researchers log every comment and interaction from 160 public Facebook pages for nearly two years. By May 2016, they had amassed enough information to track how 368 million Facebook members behaved on the social network. It is one of the largest known sets of user data ever assembled from Facebook.
“We’re concerned about how easy it was to collect this,†said Fredrik Erlandsson, one of the researchers and a lecturer at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Last December, he and his colleagues published a research paper in the journal Entropy detailing how their methods of trawling social media sites could be replicated.
Read more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/06/technology/facebook-information-data-sets-academics.html
