When accessing https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer, I can use the URL graph.facebook.com/v2.3/{groupID}/feed
and receive a list of posts from that group. Note that I am not the group administrator. See here:
However, as soon as I change that to 2.4 or above, I can no longer receive any results:
Even stranger, though, is the response time. V2.3 responded with actual content in 983MS, but V2.4 responded with nothing in 10,174MS. The long response time for nothing is indicative of every version, up to 2.9 (most recent version).
This is a real issue, because v2.3 is being deprecated July 10th, 2017. Any idea what’s going on here? It doesn’t appear that they’ve deprecated /{groupID}/feed, so why did it stop working for me?
2
Answers
Normal users can not read the feed of closed groups any more.
And no, you should not try and circumvent that by building a scraper, because scraping is not allowed. Users have the ability to view the group posts via the FB UI, and that should be all that is needed.
Yes, you can. But with an app, an additional party comes into play: The developer of that app, who could be the shadiest person sitting in wherever, doing whatever with the user data their app can read. And now imagine you were member of a closed group, where people might discuss sensitive issues such as health, sexual abuse, etc. Would you really want every other group member to be able to give an app you know nothing about access to what you posted in such a group …? No, of course not. And therefor that decision has been placed in the hands of the group admin(s) now.
unfortunately now v2.12 doesn’t give any group feed unless you have the access token for the admin of the group (public-closed-secret).