What social media can you scrape?
Honestly: not everything. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn lock most data behind logins, rate limits, or anti-bot systems. Social Scraper+ focuses on two platforms where public threads are readable in a normal browser tab: Reddit and X.
On Reddit you can export post titles, bodies, subreddit names, nested comments, scores, and timestamps from reddit.com or old.reddit.com. On X you can export post text, replies, handles, and engagement counts from public status pages at x.com or twitter.com.
We do not scrape profile pages, DMs, or private accounts. If the thread is not visible to you in Chrome, the extension cannot magic it out of thin air.
Why scrape data from social media?
Most people are not building a database of the entire internet. They want a spreadsheet of one heated product thread, or every reply to a launch post, or a JSON dump they can grep for competitor names.
Common reasons: product research (what do real users complain about?), competitive intel (who gets mentioned when people compare tools?), support triage (what broke after the last update?), and archiving (save a viral thread before it gets deleted).
Copy-pasting comments by hand works until about comment number twelve. After that, export beats carpal tunnel.
How to scrape social media data (Reddit and X)
Install Social Scraper+ from the Chrome Web Store. Open any public Reddit thread or X post. Click Scrape in the side panel. Review the preview, pick your fields in Settings, then export to clipboard, AI prompt, CSV, or JSON.
The extension reads the page in your browser. Nothing goes to our servers. Your scrape history stays in Chrome storage on your device.
For step-by-step walkthroughs, see our guides on scraping Reddit comments to CSV and scraping X replies to CSV. Same tool, platform-specific tips.
Scrape social media data without code
Python scripts, Apify actors, and proxy APIs make sense when you need thousands of pages on a schedule. They also mean maintenance: selectors break, tokens expire, bills show up monthly.
If your job is "read this thread and get the comments into a file," a Chrome extension is usually faster. You are already on the page. One click, one export, done.
Not sure which approach fits? Read our comparison of the best ways to scrape social media without writing code.