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Social data guide / 2026

Public Social Media Data API for AI Agents in 2026

Public social sources describe authors, posts, profiles, media, and feeds in incompatible ways. Normalization gives research agents a predictable, source-linked record while keeping platform-specific retrieval details out of the application.

Quick answer

Use one schema across supported public social sources.

Submit a supported public Bluesky, Instagram, Mastodon, Reddit, TikTok, X, or YouTube URL. The extractor returns a semantic post, profile, video, or feed instead of exposing each site’s interface structure.

curl --get 'https://extractor.sh/api/extract' \
  --data-urlencode 'url=https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app' \
  --data-urlencode 'format=json'

Available data

What you can extract

  • Public post text and captions when available
  • Profile names, handles, descriptions, and recent public items on supported pages
  • Authors, timestamps, canonical URLs, and media metadata
  • Semantic post, profile, video, or feed entities

AI workflows

Where normalized data helps

  • Cross-platform public research
  • Brand and creator discovery
  • Source-linked social RAG
  • Public trend classification

AI-ready output

Markdown for models. JSON for systems.

Raw HTML consumes tokens on navigation, scripts, styling, and interface labels. Clean Markdown keeps the readable hierarchy for LLM prompts and RAG chunks. Normalized JSON is better when your application needs an explicit semantic type, source, author, publication date, media, attributes, and collection items.

Always retain the canonical URL from the response. AI-generated summaries should remain traceable to the public source, especially when the underlying page can change.

Boundaries

Public data only

  • Private, deleted, login-only, and restricted content is unavailable.
  • Comments, transcripts, and full account histories are not included.
  • Metadata completeness depends on what each public source exposes.

extractor.sh does not bypass CAPTCHAs, login walls, paywalls, access controls, or regional restrictions. Review the source’s terms and applicable law before collecting or reusing data.