Social Media Giveth, Social Media Taketh Away: Facebook, Friendships, and APIs
DOIThis paper examines Facebook’s progressive restriction of API access and its implications for researchers and users attempting to understand their own social networks. It introduces the concept of “relational generativity” to describe what is lost when platforms monopolize the means of social representation.
Appears in themes
Facebook's progressive API restrictions eliminated researchers' and users' capacity to access their own social graph data. This wasn't a privacy feature but rather a monopolization of the means of representation. Introduces "relational generativity" to describe platforms' systematic capture of users' network data.
API closure demonstrates epistemic capture at infrastructure level. Users' social networks exist as local, context-dependent perceptions, but platforms force these into single global representations. An early example of the tension between local coherence and forced globalization that appears later in LLM alignment debates.
Platforms don't just restrict data access; they eliminate the capacity to produce alternative representations of social structure. By closing APIs while maintaining proprietary access, Facebook ensures only their algorithmic "routes" exist, never user-generated "maps." A case study in how technical architecture becomes epistemological constraint.