Researchers Unable to Access Data Due to TikTok’s Stringent Regulations

Leading academic institutions are expressing interest in studying user behavior on TikTok as its popularity continues to grow. While the company publicly claims to be open to such research and is collaborating with academics, researchers have found the video app’s data regulations to be excessively demanding.

TikTok is making the application programming interface, or API, open for researchers to analyze the platform’s data. But the terms of service are so strict that researchers at leading institutions say they are hesitant to accept them. The difficulty in investigating TikTok is also due to the fact that competing platforms are making it harder to verify their data and are starting to charge for access to their APIs.

Social scientists say it’s important to access TikTok in order to understand the app’s impact on issues as diverse as elections, public health communication or the spread of misinformation. By monitoring social media conversations, researchers have been able to flag inaccurate polling data that turned voters away and help local governments better communicate with the public during natural disasters like Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida last month.

TikTok’s rules say that researchers must provide advance notice of future research, allow the company to review posts before posting, and remove some information after use. The researchers said those terms could seriously hamper their efforts, and that some requirements are more demanding than competing platforms, including Google’s YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter. TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., is coming under a unique level of scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers who worry that U.S. user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government.

“TikTok is committed to working with the research community to support independent research,” a company spokesperson said. “Our goal is to make it easy to independently explore our platform and bring transparency to TikTok content while implementing the API responsibly and in a way that helps ensure data is only used for appropriate non-commercial purposes and protects the privacy rights of our community.”

The company’s terms of service require researchers to update their data sets every 15 days, more often than rivals YouTube and X, said one New York researcher, who declined to be identified for fear of being blocked from accessing TikTok’s API. Researchers also have to delete some data after using it, which can be a challenge for those who need to replicate their work, the person said.

“The things in TikTok’s terms of service that give me pause are mostly pre-release review,” said Libby Hemphill, director of the University of Michigan’s Social Media Archives.

Some social media companies have requested investigations for privacy reasons, but have used this oversight as a way to prevent unfavorable information from reaching the public. Hemphill said researchers have been able to negotiate with social platforms to end these practices, but the conversation is ongoing.

TikTok said the company plans to review the investigation only to review personal data that may need to be deleted. “Clearly, this does not grant TikTok editorial rights over what is or is not posted,” the spokesperson said.

Over the past few months, researchers from leading universities have held discussions with the company about loosening the terms of service. The video-sharing app hosted calls with researchers in February and April, said one research program administrator whose California-based institution participated in the discussions. During the calls, several other research groups raised the same concerns, but TikTok has yet to provide a status update.

The company has been actively communicating with the research community and has implemented some improvements to the Research API based on feedback. But TikTok’s API also doesn’t provide access to all the data researchers might need, said Ben Serrette, vice president of information technology. at Indiana University’s Social Media Observatory. The API doesn’t offer access to friend lists or information about whether a video was a stitch — a TikTok feature akin to reposting X’s quote — although that information is available from other platforms like X, Bluesky and Mastodon. Serrette’s team gained access to TikTok’s API over the summer before realizing some of these limitations. “We’re not able to get that data from the API, so we can’t do some of the research that we’ve done in the past on other social media platforms,” he said.

Facebook and YouTube have similar access policies, though less rigid, the researchers said. “The main problem is that there is a lack of trust not specifically in TikTok, but in social media platform-based research in general,” said Joyojeet Pal, assistant professor of information science at the University of Michigan.

The relationship between social media giants and researchers has always been fraught, but things have escalated in recent months. Twitter, now known as X, began charging for access to its API in February. This meant that researchers who were previously able to view millions of publications for free had to pay thousands of dollars for access to a fraction of that amount. Reddit also began charging for access to its data in June, leading to a site-wide boycott by third-party apps and users. And in July, X sued a research organization that detected an increase in malicious content on its platform. Some in the research community fear that other social media sites may follow X’s lead.

“In other words, any academic who does this runs the risk that the data may not be available to them at some point, or that other structural factors undermine the work,” Pal said.

Still, because of TikTok’s visibility, researchers say they need to look at who is using it and how. The social media company still has a chance to become an industry leader by opening up the app’s data in a fair way, the researchers said, adding that they hope TikTok and its competitors will respond to the feedback and open up their platforms in a meaningful way.