The Only Legal Facebook Scraper
If you’re looking to extract information from social media sites like Facebook, you’ll have some interesting options ranging from web scraping tools to highly specialized modules, such as ones that promise to scrape data from Facebook groups.
While some of these Facebook data scrapers may work once in a while, the one thing they’ll have in common is that they’re all illegal. This is because scraping Facebook is prohibited in its Terms of Service, meaning any third party who helps you violate their Terms is breaking the law, and lawsuits are already being filed.
Facebook API Scraper
So if we can’t violate the Facebook Terms of Service to scrape data, what is this webpage all about? Well thanks to a legal case in the 1980s, no company can prevent you from “recording” information that you were meant to see (think VHS tapes recording). So if we instead reframe the task of scraping data to instead simply “recording” the structured data from the Facebook API sends to your computer, we can legally help you obtain this data for personal use.
This is done though our HAR File Web Scraper, which is available here on this page as a free trial and can help you collect high quality data from Facebook about your target audience. We’ll cover a few popular use cases below, but please feel free to explore using the tool on your own to see how it works.
Scraping Facebook Pages
The HAR File Web Scraper is good at scraping dynamic content that you typically scroll through on a page, like Facebook posts. To do this, simply browse to the Facebook Page you want to scrape, begin recording your web traffic, then scroll through the posts you want to collect data on. You should be able to collect the post text, author, metadata and ID. Using the Post ID, you can then construct the Post URL by simply adding the ID to this format (you’ll need to substitute the page name): https://www.facebook.com/PAGE_NAME/posts/POST_ID
Scraping Facebook Group Members
There are a few other pre-built Facebook group scrapers out there that typically will self-compromise your Facebook account and target a specific Group ID, but as we mentioned these all use automated access and are therefore illegal to use. Instead, we can suggest using the HAR File Web Scraper mentioned on this page to simply visit any Facebook Group in your browser, click on the “Members” tab, and then while recording your web traffic scroll through all the group members you want to collect.
It’s important to note that since you’re scraping a list of basic information, you will only be able to collect this limited data back (e.g. it’s typically just the name, link to profile photo, and user ID). You will NOT be able to scrape emails, contact details, or specific information like this using our service.