Why can't all social media post content be imported?

When integrating content from social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, we are basically dependent on what the platform provides us with in terms of technology and content via the corresponding interfaces. Unfortunately, this changes regularly. Often, social media platforms are not very interested in providing all content from social media posts. Some examples of this:

Videos are generally not made available and can therefore only be seen on the details page of the post. Image galleries are provided by Twitter, but the number is limited to 4 images per post. Facebook or Instagram only provide one image in principle.

The avatars of the users, i.e. the profile picture of the content creator, are also not supplied cleanly and reliably in all cases. Therefore, it is often necessary to resort to a placeholder (usually the logo of the respective platform).

In addition, there are posts on Facebook, for example, that cannot be imported at all because they are not public and thus not accessible for our integration. A good test here is always to call up the post in the incognito mode of the browser. If this is possible, the content can probably be imported. If the post is then not displayed, it is usually also not integrable (because technically not accessible for us).

Updated on: 23/10/2023