Tutorials

 

Meta Content Library as a Research Tool

Yair Rubinstein and Kristina Lee

This session will introduce researchers to Meta Content Library and demonstrate the latest features available in its user interface (UI) and API. The Content Library provides researchers comprehensive access to public content from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Users can surface billions of data points from public posts, videos, photos, reels, story highlights, and more. The in-depth demonstration led by our partnerships and data science team will show how the API and the UI can surface this content and illuminate topics relevant to the Web-Sci community. We will also provide an overview of how individuals and research teams can apply for access to these tools, as well as provide an opportunity for attendees to share feedback with us about our products and services.

Beyond APIs: Collecting Web Data for Research using the National Internet Observatory

Pranav Goel, Kai-Cheng Yang, and Scott Cambo

The Internet serves as a vital platform for information access and global connectivity. Widespread online engagement offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behavior at scale, yet researchers face significant ethical and technical barriers when attempting to collect data for academic studies. In particular, major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have progressively restricted access to their official Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which previously served as primary tools for researchers to create customized datasets from specific platforms for studying online content production and engagement behavior. This tutorial introduces the National Internet Observatory (NIO), an alternative data collection framework and infrastructure designed to help researchers study online behavior, with a particular focus on content viewing — the predominant form of online activity. The tutorial presents NIO’s informed data donation process, participant demographics and behavioral traces, and secure computing infrastructure. The tutorial incorporates interactive activities and hands-on sessions that demonstrate NIO’s capabilities for enabling novel cross-disciplinary and cross-platform research across web and social media environments.

 

Workshops

 

Workshop on Human-centric Web Research: Tools, Experiences, Hands-on Application

Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Chris Karr

This Human-centric Web Research (HCWR) workshop will provide an overview of tools for collecting web use data from the various devices research participants may use. We will also convene a roundtable of researchers who have used these tools or data in their work to discuss the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. Finally, we will have a tutorial component using these tools to examine workshop participants’ own web browsing data privately on their computers (or sample data). Researchers who want to conduct studies analyzing human-generated behavioral web data as part of observational, experimental, qualitative, or quantitative projects will gain practical skills and references demonstrating how researchers using these techniques have engaged with theories in different social science disciplines. Chris Karr has created research software systems and open-source data collection platforms for a wide variety of research objectives for over 25 years. Ericka Menchen-Trevino began analyzing behavioral web data in 2010 as a researcher. She created a front-end tool for collecting web browsing data that has been used by thousands of participants worldwide.

Ethical Web Science

Oshani Seneviratne, Marc Spaniol, John Erickson, and Gaël Dias

The proposed Ethical Web Science Workshop at WebSci’25 seeks to explore the foundational ethical challenges posed by the rapidly evolving relationship between the Web and cutting-edge technological advancements, particularly in AI. While much attention has been paid to the ethics of artificial intelligence, it is equally vital to interrogate the ethical foundations of the Web as the substrate from which much of this AI innovation has sprung. Generative AI, recommender systems, and other transformative solutions are often powered by massive datasets sourced from the Web. These datasets frequently include user-generated content, media, and data that were never explicitly intended for such use. This workshop aims to scrutinize how Web-sourced information has been leveraged and to question whether current practices uphold principles of fairness, transparency, and consent. One key focus of the workshop will be the role of explainability as a barometer for Ethical Web Science. If systems derived from Web-based data cannot explain their outputs in ways that are accessible and meaningful to stakeholders, they risk perpetuating opacity and eroding trust. As such, explainability must be examined not merely as a technical problem but as a fundamental ethical issue. Furthermore, the workshop will investigate the shift in global digital discourse following the functional decline of platforms like Twitter, which once served as prominent arenas for public discussion and data collection. How researchers now navigate this void and what implications this has for representativeness, consent, and bias in Web-based research will be central to the dialogue.

Global Elections and Information Security

Cody Buntain, Masha Krupenkin, Julia Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Golbeck

http://geis.institute/websci2025/

This workshop focuses on addressing the long-term vulnerabilities in election security, such as public trust erosion, polarization, and cybersecurity challenges, by exploring socio-technical solutions and policy frameworks. It brings together interdisciplinary scholars to propose methods for safeguarding elections, improving democratic discourse, and tackling AI-driven threats like disinformation and biased political communication. Times between election cycles are especially critical moments to address these issues.

Human-GenAI Interactions: Shaping the Future of Web Science

Lydia Manikonda, Oshani Seneviratne, and Rui Fan

How do interactions with genAI influence the ecosystem of world wide web as well as users and their behaviors on the web? What are the emerging behaviors that evolve through reliance on genAI? What are the different ethical, societal and technological implications through human-genAI interactions on the web and for the web ? This workshop aims to invite submissions via research papers and demonstrations from the web science community and beyond to discuss ideas as well as foster collaborations to tackle the different aspects of how human and genAI interactions will influence the architecture of the web and human behaviors.