Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: Migration and mobility present major societal challenges, while also representing key opportunities. New data sources from social media, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, offer valuable insights that can help us measure and understand patterns of long-term migration and short-term mobility, as well as immigrant integration along various dimensions. In this chapter, we describe how Facebook data for advertisers can be used to quantify migration, and to study levels of assimilation of migrants based on the interests they express online. We use the term assimilation in a technical or neutral sense to express a measure of the distance between groups. In LinkedIn, aggregate-level information can be harvested to discover where migrants have studied, and where they live and work. In addition, all social media advertising data sources provide information about the languages that people speak (e.g., Polish speakers on Snapchat in London). Across all case studies, we discuss the limitations and risks of using these data, including privacy and legal concerns. Given the difficulty of collecting timely migration data, particularly for traits related to cultural assimilation, the methods we develop and the results we provide in this study open up new lines of research that computational social scientists are well-positioned to address.
Source: British Academy eBooks
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: European Commission, Aalto-Yliopisto
OpenAlex ID: W4377250137