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I have a list of various Facebook links of videos, photos, statuses, etc. posted by users with public profiles or public pages. I want to check if the links are still active and the content is still available (i.e. video wasn't taken down or deleted). Facebook does not give a 404 error so I can't send a simple GET request and there are many variations of "content not found" pages that I don't think I can base it on the page returned.

Would it require the Facebook Graph API to do this? What permissions would be required? From my research, it looks like significant permissions would be required for users to grant to the app. Is there any other way to query public Facebook data without creating an "app"?

Jaycee
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  • An app is the basis for doing _anything_ via the API; and trying to interact with content on Facebook in other ways, is not really allowed to begin with. – CBroe Mar 04 '20 at 07:38
  • You would need permission to read their posts / photos / videos from every user profile individually, and you would have to deal with issues such as access tokens expiring over time or data access expiry coming into play at some point. And for public page content, you would have to get your app approved for the Public Page Content Access feature first. – CBroe Mar 04 '20 at 07:39
  • That's unfortunately what I suspected. Thanks @CBroe Any thoughts on the accuracy of doing GET requests and just checking the returned page for a redirect notice? – Jaycee Mar 06 '20 at 18:16
  • Probably would not help at all - you get the _“This page isn't available - The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed”_ 404 page from Facebook for stuff that doesn’t exist, as well as for stuff that you are not currently allowed to see. So this won’t help to differentiate between the two cases. – CBroe Mar 09 '20 at 07:18

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