Error - Cookies Turned Off

/padr.12102

  • Facebook Advertisement pour les Sciences Sociales
    (séminaire annoncé sur la liste quanti

    Facebook Advertising data for demographic research: from human mobility to the urban-rural divide

    SPEAKER: Michele Tizzoni, ISI Foundation, Turin

    ABSTRACT:
    A digital resource becoming popular in demography studies is the Facebook Advertising platform, which provides advertisers with an estimate of a potential advertisement’s reach, given the location, demographic, or behavioral constraints of the target audience. Thus providing a digital "census’’ of its estimated 2.23 billion monthly active user base, this resource has prompted studies in tracking health conditions, migration, and gender inequality.

    In this talk, I will provide an overview of the promises and limitations of the Facebook Advertising platform for demographic research.
    In particular, I will present two studies based on the analysis of Facebook Advertising estimates.

    In the first study, we explore the use of Facebook advertising data as an alternative source to model human mobility patterns at country scale. We use Facebook advertising audience estimates to quantify the number of commuters in the Italian Provinces and French Departments and compare such estimates with official census data.

    In the second study, we examine the usefulness of the Facebook Advertising platform in measuring potential rural-urban inequalities. We focus on Italy, a country where about 30% of the population lives in rural areas.

    First, we show that the population statistics that Facebook produces suffer from instability across time and incomplete coverage of sparsely populated municipalities.
    To overcome such limitations, we propose an alternative methodology for estimating Facebook Ads audiences that nearly triple the coverage of the rural municipalities and makes feasible fine-grained sub-population analysis.

    Using official national census data, we evaluate our approach and confirm known significant urban-rural divides in terms of educational attainment and income.