Tautalus
Regular Member
- Messages
- 585
- Reaction score
- 1,495
- Points
- 93
- Ethnic group
- Portuguese
- Y-DNA haplogroup
- I2-M223 / I-FTB15368
- mtDNA haplogroup
- H6a1b2y
The "Social Connectedness Index (SCI)" is a global dataset measuring the strength of social ties between geographic locations using Facebook friendship networks. It covers national and subnational units across 178 countries and greatly expands the geographic coverage and resolution of previous releases.
The SCI estimates the probability that a randomly selected Facebook user in one location is friends with a randomly selected user in another location, making it a relative measure of social connectedness rather than a count of friendships. Higher values indicate stronger social ties, and the measure is symmetric by construction.
The dataset is built from Facebook users active during the 30 days before 25 January 2026 who had more than 20 friends. Friendship links are aggregated across geographic units, protected with differential privacy, and scaled for public release while excluding areas with fewer than 500 users to preserve privacy.
The authors argue that the SCI provides an unprecedented large scale measure of social networks that can be linked with economic, demographic, migration, health, and political data. Previous versions have already been used to study trade, migration, COVID-19 spread, investment behaviour, and refugee movements.
Despite relying only on Facebook users and measuring the existence rather than the intensity of friendships, the SCI appears highly stable over time and offers one of the most comprehensive global datasets for studying the geography of human social relationships.
Many kinds of maps and network analyses can be generated. For country level maps, you can create maps showing the most socially connected countries, heat maps of social connectedness from one selected country to all others, clusters of countries that are socially interconnected, comparisons between social connectedness and geographic distance.
social-connectedness.org
Social connectedness of Bruxelles
The SCI estimates the probability that a randomly selected Facebook user in one location is friends with a randomly selected user in another location, making it a relative measure of social connectedness rather than a count of friendships. Higher values indicate stronger social ties, and the measure is symmetric by construction.
The dataset is built from Facebook users active during the 30 days before 25 January 2026 who had more than 20 friends. Friendship links are aggregated across geographic units, protected with differential privacy, and scaled for public release while excluding areas with fewer than 500 users to preserve privacy.
The authors argue that the SCI provides an unprecedented large scale measure of social networks that can be linked with economic, demographic, migration, health, and political data. Previous versions have already been used to study trade, migration, COVID-19 spread, investment behaviour, and refugee movements.
Despite relying only on Facebook users and measuring the existence rather than the intensity of friendships, the SCI appears highly stable over time and offers one of the most comprehensive global datasets for studying the geography of human social relationships.
Many kinds of maps and network analyses can be generated. For country level maps, you can create maps showing the most socially connected countries, heat maps of social connectedness from one selected country to all others, clusters of countries that are socially interconnected, comparisons between social connectedness and geographic distance.
Social Connectedness Index
Explore and map Facebook's Social Connectedness Index — the relative likelihood of friendship between places.
social-connectedness.org
Social connectedness of Bruxelles
Comparison of social connectedness between countries
