Meta Content Library and API
Welcome to Meta Content Library and API. This page provides a broad-level overview of these products and acquaints you with the documentation resources that are available. To learn about obtaining access, see Get Access.
Content Library: a web-based tool that allows researchers to explore and understand data across Facebook and Instagram by offering a comprehensive visual and searchable collection of publicly accessible content. Learn more about Content Library.
Content Library API: an API for querying and analyzing Meta's full public content archive. The API supports data analysis in Python and R in Meta's Researcher Platform, a secure digital cleanroom. VPN connection is required for Researcher Platform. The API can also be used in an approved third-party cleanroom. Each third-party cleanroom environment has its own user interface, the documentation of which is outside the scope of Meta Content Library and API documentation. Learn more about Content Library API.
Content Library and API are controlled-access environments. The functionality to download the public data subset is only available in the Content Library user interface (not in the API), and only if the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) has approved your Meta Content Library application and you or your institution has consented to the appropriate contract terms (Product Terms for Meta Research Tools, Information Sharing Agreement). You can perform programmatic analysis of the public content from the library by using Content Library API in Researcher Platform or in an approved third-party cleanroom environment.
Content Library highlights
Searching and filtering
Searching all public posts across Facebook or Instagram is easy with comprehensive sorting and filtering options. Post results can be filtered by language, view count, media type, content producer and more. Search results can be shown in card view or table view.
Multimedia
Photos, videos and reels are available for dynamic search, exploration and analysis.
Producer lists
You can apply custom producer lists to a search query to surface public content from specific creators on Facebook or Instagram.
Trends in posts created
Researchers can explore a graph showing a normalized trend of how often content matching their search keywords was posted on Facebook and Instagram within their chosen date range.
Documentation resources
- The Content Library "About" tab
has comprehensive documentation right in the UI.
- Content Library documentation
has the same information, but does not require access to the Content Library UI.
- Quick links
provides quick access to key topics of interest to Content Library and API users.
Content Library API highlights
Endpoints and data fields
With eight dedicated endpoints, Content Library API searches over 100 data fields. For Instagram this includes accounts, posts and comments. For Facebook this includes Pages, posts, comments, profiles, groups and events
Search indexing and results
The API has powerful search capabilities and can return up to 100,000 results per query.
Asynchronous search
In addition to synchronous search, you can submit asynchronous queries in Content Library API. This means a search can run in the background while you submit other queries or work on other tasks.
Documentation resources
- Quick links
provides quick access to key topics of interest to Content Library and API users.
Researcher Platform highlights
Researcher Platform is a virtual data cleanroom that provides secure access to Facebook and Instagram datasets and tools designed for researchers.
Free computation
Computation and data analysis on Researcher Platform are free. The platform supports researchers collaborating on terabyte- to petabyte-scale datasets.
JupyterHub environment
Researcher Platform runs a modified, access-controlled version of JupyterHub—an open source tool that supports R, Python, SQL and a range of standard statistical packages. It offers both CPU and GPU servers.
Research outputs
You can export your research outputs under agreed-upon terms and conditions. Research outputs can consist of code, figures, tables, graphs and statistics.