This is a long and fascinating look at the tug of war between platforms (especially Facebook) and the researchers who study them. The hook is a story about a researcher who was collecting data being told she was scraping personal data without permission, only to realize later that by 'personal data' Facebook mean advertisers' public pages. "To Facebook, advertisers are users too, and important ones at that. Scraping advertiser data, even data Facebook makes public, and publishing it without the advertiser's consent is a violation of Facebook's rules." There's a lot more to this story, and the author tries to balance the interests of the platform - "after all, the Cambridge Analytica scandal ended up costing Facebook $5 billion in fines" - and the reality that "scraping is not a crime".
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