One of the requirements for the tool I’m building is to integrate with the CrowdTangle API to pull the latest posts from Facebook groups and pages for consideration to be included in Bloomfield’s Daily Bulletin.
Since Facebook does not provide API access to Facebook page or group content unless you are an owner/administrator of those pages and groups, CrowdTangle is, as far as I’m aware, the one and only official tool available to journalists and researchers who want to have programmatic access to updates from a large number of Facebook groups and pages.
Here’s what the dashboard looks like on the CrowdTangle site:
CrowdTangle has some good documentation for their API but I was not able to find much in the way of tooling or libraries for interacting with their API, even though it’s used widely by journalism organizations.
Since I would need to build that kind of library for this capstone project anyway, I decided to do it in a way that could benefit other journalism organizations, and created it as an open source package that is now available on GitHub:
So now, anyone building an application in PHP that needs to integrate with CrowdTangle will have a head start that hopefully helps them get up and running much faster.
I let the Facebook/Meta/CrowdTangle folks know about it and they are currently testing it out for inclusion in their documentation. I also shared about it on my personal technology blog. And of course, I’m now making use of it in the Bloomfield web application.