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Studying Migrant Assimilation Through Facebook Interests

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11186))

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Abstract

Migrant assimilation is a major challenge for European societies, in part because of the sudden surge of refugees in recent years and in part because of long-term demographic trends. In this paper, we use Facebook data for advertisers to study the levels of assimilation of Arabic-speaking migrants in Germany, as seen through the interests they express online. Our results indicate a gradient of assimilation along demographic lines, language spoken and country of origin. Given the difficulty to collect timely migration data, in particular for traits related to cultural assimilation, the methods that we develop and the results that we provide open new lines of research that computational social scientists are well-positioned to address.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://refugeesmigrants.un.org/migration-compact.

  2. 2.

    https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/targeting-specs/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.facebook.com/business/help/150756021661309.

  4. 4.

    https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/buying-api/targeting.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/maraujo/pySocialWatcher.

  6. 6.

    We started with 3,000 interest IDs obtained in the summer of 2017, but 93 of those were subsequently removed by Facebook.

  7. 7.

    We use the Facebook advertising platform terminology which does not refer to migrants but to expats, though we use migrant and expat interchangeably.

  8. 8.

    A regional league of 22 Arabic-speaking countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_League.

  9. 9.

    https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182371508761821.

  10. 10.

    https://www.brookings.edu/research/cities-and-refugees-the-german-experience/.

  11. 11.

    We also tested for other values of k, 10–50 in intervals of 10, and the trends in the results remain consistent. So we only report results for \(k = 50\).

  12. 12.

    http://bit.ly/2E4UqpD.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Antoine Dubois

  2. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

    Emilio Zagheni

  3. EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Kiran Garimella

  4. Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar

    Ingmar Weber

Authors
  1. Antoine Dubois
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  2. Emilio Zagheni
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  3. Kiran Garimella
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  4. Ingmar Weber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kiran Garimella .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

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Dubois, A., Zagheni, E., Garimella, K., Weber, I. (2018). Studying Migrant Assimilation Through Facebook Interests. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01158-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01159-8

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