Migrating social media data with the data transfer project
Data portability and transparency are ongoing issues that plague all major social media giants. Who owns the data you post to your social media accounts? Can you get a copy of the data if you ask for it? If you had a copy, what could you do with it?
Many leading social media companies have APIs that let you extract and upload data, but the data formats tend to be dissimilar and proprietary, which means if you obtained the data, you couldn't do much with it unless you are a programmer yourself and have plenty of time for personal coding.
Back in 2018, a few leading social media companies pledged to make an effort at addressing this problem. The result is the Data Transfer Project, which was recently rebranded and expanded as the Data Transfer Initiative [1]. The mission of the Data Transfer Project (and Initiative) is to support a common neutral format for social media data as it passes from one platform to another, as well as to provide the tools necessary for transforming data in and out of that format.
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