Pal and Hemphill: Tiktok’s rules deter researchers from accessing data

Researchers are calling on TikTok to loosen its terms of service, making it easier to access their data and study the app’s impact on misinformation. 

For Bloomberg, University of Michigan associate professor Joyojoeet Pal and associate professor Libby Hemphill talk about the challenges of accessing TikTok’s application programming interface (API). 

Pal and Hemphill discuss TikTok’s strict terms of service, which are requiring researchers to give TikTok advanced notice about their research and delete data after its use. 

“The things in the TikTok terms of service that give me pause are mostly about pre-publication review,” Hemphill says. 

Pal says the problem isn’t just with TikTok, but an ongoing trend among social media companies to make it more difficult for researchers to do their work. 

The “most important issue is, there is a trust deficit, not specific to TikTok, but with social media platform based research in general,” Pal says. “In other words, any academic doing this is taking some risks that the data may either not be theirs to use at some point, or that the work will be undermined by other structural factors.” 

Related

Read “TikTok's Rules Deter Researchers From Crunching Data on Users, Misinformation” on Bloomberg.

Learn more about associate professor of information Joyojeet Pal by visiting his UMSI faculty profile. 

Learn more about associate professor Libby Hemphill by visiting her UMSI faculty profile. 

— Noor Hindi, UMSI public relations specialist