Zeeschuimerrecommended by the médialab

Zeeschuimer is a browser extension that monitors traffic while browsing social media, and collects seen posts/items for later systematic analysis. Its target audience is researchers who study content on social media platforms that resist conventional scraping or API-based data collection.

You can, for example, browse TikTok and later export a list of all posts you saw in the order you saw them in. Data can be exported as a JSON file or exported to a 4CAT instance for analysis and storage. Zeeschuimer is primarily intended as a companion to 4CAT, but you can also integrate its output into your own analysis pipeline.

Currently, it supports the following platforms:

• TikTok (posts and comments)
• Instagram (posts only)
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• 9gag
• Imgur
• Douyin
• Gab
• Truth Social
• Pinterest
• RedNote/Xiaohongshu

The extension does not interfere with your normal browsing and never uploads data automatically, only when you explicitly ask it to do so. It uses the browser API to locally collect and parse the data search engines are sending to your browser as you use it.