Quantifying the Intraregional Migration in Latin America Using Facebook: A Validity Assessment Based on Household Surveys

Camila Montiel, Programa de Población - Universidad De La República
Sofia Gil-Clavel, TU Delft
Victoria Prieto Rosas, Universidad de la República, Uruguay

Digital traces are increasingly being considered as alternative data sources for monitoring international displacement in real time, although evidence of their validity is still limited in low- and middle-income regions. While web-based social media data, such as Facebook users’ information, have been used to study migration trends in Latin America, household surveys have not yet been used to validate these data. This paper examines how Facebook users identified as having ‘previously lived in’ specific locations match migrant population figures reported by household surveys in Latin American countries for 2021, 2022 and 2023. Multivariate analysis shows a high correlation between the two datasets, albeit with a general bias towards overestimating of Facebook by origin and destination. Although Facebook data is more consistent with United Nations data than with survey data, the results still show a good fit with traditional sources, confirming the value of using Facebook data for real-time estimation of migrant stocks.

Keywords: International Migration, Big data, Digital and computational demography

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