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A team of statistical researchers at Meta, owner of Facebook, working with colleagues from the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University, has applied a specially designed algorithm to analyze Facebook data to track human migration around the world in the year 2022. The team has posted a describing their efforts and results on the arXiv preprint server.

Officials in many countries are interested in tracking migration in and out of their country, and international organizations are equally interested in tracking migration globally as a way to help allocate aid or provide assistance to migrants. Currently, most migration rates are measured using census or administrative data, which in some cases are not very accurate.

In this new effort, the researchers took another approach: making use of the massive amount of data associated with the Facebook user community.

People who use Facebook reveal their IP address when they log on to the site, which can be used to estimate where they live. Many people also post their address information, in a general sense, such as their town and state.

To use such data to track migration, the researchers took a historical approach, using an original location as a likely home country, and then noting changes to the country in which they appear to be residing for a period of time, such as a year.

Their algorithm then tested for such changes for every person registered on Facebook. It then counted how many people moved from each country and to where, aggregated them monthly, and used weights to account for changes in population in a given country. The researchers also added other weights to their algorithm to account for people who like to travel, particularly the wealthy.

To test the quality of their results, the research team compared migration statistics from their system with high-quality data collected from countries like New Zealand and found an average correlation of approximately 0.98.

The result, the team claims, are rich statistics regarding migration between 181 countries over the year 2022, when 39.1 million migrated between 181 countries—all based on data from more than 3 billion people. They claim these statistics improve on existing data collected in other ways.

They also point out that their algorithm can be changed to different years and for a variety of purposes, such as to focus on a war, a climate disaster or economic differences.

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