Study Conducted by Professor Guy Abel Introduces New Approach to Measuring Global Migration Flows Using Online Data
Existing estimates of human migration are limited in scope, reliability, and timelines. A recently published paper co-authored by Professor Guy J. Abel, Professor in the Department of Sociology at HKU, and collaborators from Harvard University and Meta introduces an approach to measuring global migration flows using online data, enhancing the scope and detail of existing efforts.
The study utilised privacy-protected records from over 3 billion Facebook users to estimate monthly country-to-country migration flows between 181 countries, which can be generated with less delay than traditional methods. The findings highlighted significant changes in migration patterns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a 64% decline in migration flows during the crisis and a rebound to a pace 24% above the pre-crisis rate in 2022. It also revealed a tenfold increase in migration from Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion.
In collaboration with NGOs, the team is exploring humanitarian applications for their data and has made their estimates publicly available through the Humanitarian Data Exchange to support research and political interventions.
This study was recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in an article entitled “Measuring global migration flows using online data”.
Link to the paper: here