Facebook uses an anonymized snapshot of all active Facebook users and their friendship networks to measure the intensity of connectedness between locations. The Social Connectedness Index (SCI) is a measure of the social connectedness between different geographies. Specifically, it measures the relative probability that two individuals across two locations are friends with each other on Facebook. Region identifiers are taken from GADM v2.8 https://gadm.org/download_country_v2.html.

The Social Connectedness Index measures the strength of connectedness between two geographic areas as represented by Facebook friendship ties. These connections can reveal important insights about economic opportunities, social mobility, trade and more. An anonymized snapshot of all active Facebook users and their friendship networks to measure the intensity of connectedness between locations was used.

Abstract (en): Social networks can shape many aspects of social and economic activity: migration and trade, job-seeking, innovation, consumer preferences and sentiment, public health, social mobility, and more. In turn, social networks themselves are associated with geographic proximity, historical ties, political boundaries, and other factors. Traditionally, the unavailability of large-scale and representative data on social connectedness between individuals or geographic regions has posed a challenge for empirical research on social networks. More recently, a body of such research has begun to emerge using data on social connectedness from online social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To date, most of these research projects have been built on anonymized administrative microdata from Facebook, typically by working with coauthor teams that include Facebook employees. However, there is an inherent limit to the number of researchers that will be able to work with social network data through such collaborations. In this paper, we therefore introduce a new measure of social connectedness at the US county level. Our Social Connectedness Index is based on friendship links on Facebook, the global online social networking service. Specifically, the Social Connectedness Index corresponds to the relative frequency of Facebook friendship links between every county-pair in the United States, and between every US county and every foreign country. Given Facebook's scale as well as the relative representativeness of Facebook's user body, these data provide the first comprehensive measure of friendship networks at a national level.

Nowadays, new branches of research are proposing the use of non-traditional data sources for the study of migration trends in order to find an original methodology to answer open questions about cross-border human mobility. The Multi-aspect Integrated Migration Indicators (MIMI) dataset is a new dataset to be exploited in migration studies as a concrete example of this new approach. It includes both official data about bidirectional human migration (traditional flow and stock data) with multidisciplinary variables and original indicators, including economic, demographic, cultural and geographic indicators, together with the Facebook Social Connectedness Index (SCI). It is built by gathering, embedding and integrating traditional and novel variables, resulting in this new multidisciplinary dataset that could significantly contribute to nowcast/forecast bilateral migration trends and migration drivers.

Thanks to this variety of knowledge, experts from several research fields (demographers, sociologists, economists) could exploit MIMI to investigate the trends in the various indicators, and the relationship among them. Moreover, it could be possible to develop complex models based on these data, able to assess human migration by evaluating related interdisciplinary drivers, as well as models able to nowcast and predict traditional migration indicators in accordance with original variables, such as the strength of social connectivity. Here, the SCI could have an important role. It measures the relative probability that two individuals across two countries are friends with each other on Facebook, therefore it could be employed as a proxy of social connections across borders, to be studied as a possible driver of migration.

All in all, the motivations for building and releasing the MIMI dataset lie in the need of new perspectives, methods and analyses that can no longer prescind from taking into account a variety of new factors. The heterogeneous and multidimensional sets of data present in MIMI offer an all-encompassing overview of the characteristics of human migration, enabling a better understanding and an original potential exploration of the relationship between migration and non-traditional sources of data.

The MIMI dataset is made up of one single CSV file that includes 28,821 rows (records/entries) and 876 columns (variables/features/indicators). Each row is identified uniquely by a pairs of countries, built from the joining of the two ISO-3166 alpha-2 codes for the origin and destination country, respectively. The dataset contains as main features the country-to-country bilateral migration flows and stocks, together with multidisciplinary variables measuring cultural, demographic, geographic and economic variables for the two countries, together with the Facebook strength of connectedness of each pair.

Related paper: Goglia, D., Pollacci, L., Sirbu, A. (2022). Dataset of Multi-aspect Integrated Migration Indicators. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6500885

The Multi-aspect Integrated Migration Indicators (MIMI) dataset is the result of the process of gathering, embedding and combining traditional migration datasets, mostly from sources like Eurostat and United Nations, and alternative types of data, which consists in multidisciplinary features and measures not typically employed in migration studies, such as the Facebook Social Connectedness Index (SCI). Its purpose is to exploit these novel types of data for: nowcasting migration flows and stocks, studying integration of multiple sources and knowledge, and investigating migration drivers. The MIMI dataset is designed to have a unique pair of countries for each row. Each record contains country-to-country information about: migrations flows and stock their share, their strength of Facebook connectedness and other features, such as corresponding populations, GDP, coordinates, NET migration, and many others.

This statistic shows a ranking of the estimated average internet connection speed in 2020 in Africa, differentiated by country. The speed refers to a weighted average of fixed- and mobile broadband connection speeds. Fixed-broadband connections are weighted with the household size in the selected region to account for the fact that these connections are usually shared by multiple household members.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in more than 150 countries and regions worldwide. All input data are sourced from international institutions, national statistical offices, and trade associations. All data has been are processed to generate comparable datasets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).