Facebook Groups API After 2024: Reading Public Groups

November 8, 2026

If you built on the Facebook Groups API, you know it is gone. This post covers what changed, what you can still do with public groups, and how to study a group without crossing lines with its members. Private groups are out of scope: their content is meant for members, and you should not try to read it from outside.

What happened to the Groups API

Meta's Graph API v19.0 changelog deprecated the Groups API permissions and features, including publish_to_groups and groups_access_member_info, plus the ability for admins to install apps on a group. Meta said these "will be removed April 22, 2024" for all versions v19.0 changelog. Since then there has been no general official API to read group posts, even for public groups.

What is left

Study groups responsibly

A public group is still a community of real people, many of whom post as themselves. A few rules keep your research on the right side:

• Study topics, not people. Count themes and questions. Don't build profiles of members.
• Drop names by default. Store post text, time and reaction counts. Keep author names only if your use case truly needs them, and know your obligations under privacy laws such as the GDPR.
• Never quote a member by name in public work. Paraphrase, or ask permission.
• Don't message members from data you collected. That is spam, and it breaks the trust the group runs on.
• Respect the group's own rules. Some public groups ask members not to share posts outside.

Finding public groups worth studying

Not every big group is useful. Before you track one, check:

• It is public. The group page says whether it is public or private. Only track public ones.
• It is active. Look at the dates of the last ten posts. If they span months, move on.
• It is on topic. Some groups are mostly self-promotion. Read twenty posts first. If most are links to the poster's own business, the group won't tell you much about customers.
• It has moderators. Moderated groups have less spam, which makes keyword counts more honest.

Good sources for finding groups: Facebook's own group search, links from competitors' Pages, and groups that industry newsletters mention.

Method: track what a group talks about

1. Pick 3 to 5 public groups in your niche.
2. Pull the most recent posts each week, sorted chronologically.
3. Count keyword mentions from a list you maintain: product names, competitor names, pain points.
4. Track weekly totals. A rising count is a trend; a sudden spike is usually one viral thread worth reading.

import collections, os, requests

KEY = os.environ["SCRAPEIO_API_KEY"]
TERMS = ["refund", "shipping", "alternative", "price", "broken"]

r = requests.get("https://scrapeio.com/v1/facebook/group/posts",
                 params={"url": "https://www.facebook.com/groups/GROUP_ID",
                         "sort_by": "CHRONOLOGICAL"},
                 headers={"x-api-key": KEY}, timeout=60)
body = r.json()["data"]
print(list(body)[:10])  # look at the shape once, then pick the list of posts

posts = body.get("posts") or body.get("items") or []
counts = collections.Counter()
for p in posts:
    text = str(p).lower()
    for t in TERMS:
        counts[t] += text.count(t)
print(counts.most_common())

The script prints the response's top-level keys first. Group posts are passed through in the source's own shape, so check it once and adjust the line that picks the list.

What a group's numbers tell you

• Member count: size, not activity.
• Posts per day: the real health signal. A 200,000-member group with 3 posts a day is quieter than a 5,000-member group with 50.
• Comments per post: how much the members talk to each other.

How to do it with ScrapeIO

The Facebook group API returns a public group's details from its URL or numeric id, and the Facebook group posts API returns its posts, sorted by top posts, recent activity or time, with a cursor for more. Both cost 1 credit a call and read only public groups.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/changelog/version19.0/
• https://transparency.meta.com/researchtools/meta-content-library/