I want to make an application that needs to collect some public data from facebook.
Specifically I need to check reactions and comments made on public posts.
I've noticed two things:
First, According to https://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php,
scraping is not allowed unless facebook gives you a written permission. (of which how do I ask for permission anyway?)
Second, as far as I see the graph api doesn't allow to get information regarding posts made by another user/page. Am I wrong?
How do I get the information I need in a legal way and is it even possible?
To get public posts in a page and reactions and comments on these posts your app will need will need Page Public Content Access permission. If you have not already created the app, you can find how to do this in this link and how to review your app for permissions in this link.
Once you have the permission you can get public posts from a page using below API request:
https://graph.facebook.com/<PAGE_ID>/posts?access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>&fields=name
Get the id of posts you need details for from the response of the above request
Then you can use the below request's to get reactions and comments of the post based on the post id
Get total reactions:
https://graph.facebook.com/<POST_ID>?fields=reactions.summary(true)&access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>
Get total reactions of a specific type (NONE, LIKE, LOVE, WOW, HAHA, SAD, ANGRY, THANKFUL, PRIDE):
https://graph.facebook.com/<POST_ID>?fields=reactions.summary(true).type(<REACTION_TYPE>)&access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>
Get comments:
https://graph.facebook.com/<POST_ID>?access_token=<ACCESS_TOKEN>&fields=comments.summary(true).limit(999).filter(stream).fields(id,message,created_time,parent)
And as for public posts by a user you will be able to get the total reactions with the same request by providing the post id if the post is public, but you cannot get the comments, however you will get the comments count
Related
I see the API has fields for getting comments given a post/photo/page id. Is there a field to grab a all comments made by a user?
something like this /me?fields=comments?
No, comments are always bound to another resource (post, photo, ...). There is no API to get ALL comments made by the user.
I'm using Facebook for many years, and I've liked and commented a lot of friends posts (status, photos, etc). The problem is that I didn't pay attention to that these posts were "public" or "for friends only". As a result, a person who is not a friends of mine can now see all these contents using a request of Graph Search like:
Photos liked by USERNAME
Posts liked by USERNAME
Posts commented on by USERNAME
...
Of course I could remove likes and comments one by one from the Activity log, but it would take several months... I could also use the Toolkit for Facebook available on Chrome, but unfortunately it only proposes to remove ALL likes or comments, of any kind, whereas I want to do it only for public ones.
Edit: This Chrome pluggin is actually a fake, don't use it!
Is there a way to do it with Graph API?
This post seems to mention there isn't, but I'm not sure. I found this post for instance.
Edit: #CBroe confirms "Facebook has recently removed the ability to (un-)like objects in the name of the user" so I guess the latter link is obsolete?
Admitting we've retrieved the posts or comments ID, for instance by parsing the html response of the Graph Search result, then:
Is there another way to launch a request to FB which unlikes or removes posts/comments?
What do you think about it?
Thanks!
The Short Version:
"I can visit the public page without being logged into Facebook and see underneath the post is says "2155 shares" I would like to know how to access that number through the API"
The Details:
I'm trying to use the newest version (v2.5) of the graph HTTP API to determine the total share count for a public video. The problem is FB seems to have changed the API enough that older posts on SO no longer answer this question.
Looking at the Graph API Documentation it appears that video nodes now have the "sharedposts" edge. However, calling this route with summary=true only returns a few of the shares and no value for a total count. This returns counts for comments and likes so I'm not using the endpoints incorrectly or messing up my authorization.
I've also tried to use the URL Node but this doesn't seem to do much with links inside of Facebook. I simply get a JSON response with an 'id' field with the same url I supplied as a request parameter. Seems like this route is meant to be used for links to content outside of Facebook.
I've tried the above methods with multiple videos on multiple public pages so I don't think it is due to the group owners restricting access, unless this is the new default.
It seems arbitrary that I would be allowed access to total counts for comments and likes, but not shares. Is there some legacy way to do this or am I out of luck for now?
You should query the Post element containing the Video element.
Each video posted is also contained in a post element.
The post id is then composed of the video id prepended with the posting entities id (user, page etc'), separated with an underscore.
It then looks like: user-id_video-id.
Then using the Graph API to get the share count of a post is straightforward:
GET /v2.5/{post-id}?fields=shares
Example
Lets take a video from the BBC page:
https://www.facebook.com/bbcnews/videos/10153524838517217/
(Please tell me if the link is broken. I'll switch it to something newer :))
Video id : 10153524838517217
Page id (see below): 228735667216
--> Post id: 228735667216_10153524838517217
And the request would be:
GET /v2.5/228735667216_10153524838517217?fields=shares
(open in the Graph API explorer)
Page id
to get the page id, you could query the video element for the from field.
GET /v2.5/10153524838517217?fields=from
I'm trying to get posts with a certain keyword (in fact, a hashtag), but I'm not receiving all posts. For example, there are a lot of posts done by users on a certain page that are not being pulled although they're public. The call I do is similar to this one:
https://graph.facebook.com/search?type=post&q=keyword&access_token=XXXXX
Not sure if this type of posts are considered public but only retrievable by specifying the page:
https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID/feed?access_token=XXXXX
But I need to retrieve all public posts containing a certain keyword and I don't know exactly which pages could users post to with this hashtag...
Be aware that Facebook has just taken down public post search in Graph API v2.0 so you won't be available to do that anymore.
Check https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/upgrading under section Graph API "Public post search is no longer available. (/search?type=post&q=foobar)"
I'm trying to build an app using facebook's JS SDK and Graph API, and got a little confused in process. The idea is simply to take every post user have created on his timeline. As listed in docs to do this you need to call feed connection, to get an array of post object representing posts users make to their wall.
The thing is when using standard request to get last 30 post (with read_stream permission)
FB.api('/me/feed?limit=30&format=json', function(response) {
//operations on response.data
}
in response graph api returns not only the timeline posts user made, but also some of comments on other peoples posts. So it seems feed doesn't return just "The user's wall." posts, as written in doc, but all things user posted. Request to */user_id/posts* is giving pretty much the same result.
The confusing part is that user text posts to his/hers timeline and comments on other people's posts have the same type of "status". The difference between them is that timeline post has it's content in "message" field and comment stores text in "story".
So my question: Is there a way to sort only timeline posts made by user, within a request itself?
So after facebook updated it's docs it is now clear that you need to call /{user-id}/posts to show only the posts that were published by user.
Call to /{user-id}/feed on the other hand returns the feed of posts, including status updates and links published by user, or by others on user's profile.
More about so called "derivative edges" here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/user/#edges