Social media & Migration (Bibliography)

Last updated on Sep 15, 2023

Ordered alphabetically by section.

General reviews and overview literature

  1. Bosco, C., Grubanov-Boskovic, S., Iacus, S., Minora, U., Sermi, F., & Spyratos, S. (2022). Data innovation in demography, migration and human mobility. DOI: 10.2760/958409
  2. Cesare, Nina; Lee, Hedwig; McCormick, Tyler; Spiro, Emma; Zagheni, Emilio (2018): Promises and Pitfalls of Using Digital Traces for Demographic Research. In Demography 55 (5), pp. 1979–1999. DOI: 10.1007/s13524-018-0715-2.
  3. Drouhot, Lucas G.; Deutschmann, Emanuel; Zuccotti, Carolina V.; Zagheni, Emilio (2022): Computational approaches to migration and integration research: promises and challenges. In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp. 1–19. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2022.2100542.
  4. International Organization for Migration (IOM), 2023. Harnessing Data Innovation for Migration Policy: A Handbook for Practitioners. IOM, Geneva
  5. Kashyap, R., Rinderknecht, R. G., Akbaritabar, A., Alburez-Gutierrez, D., Gil-Clavel, S., Grow, A., … & Zhao, X. (2023). Digital and computational demography. In Research Handbook on Digital Sociology (pp. 48-86). Edward Elgar Publishing.
  6. Kim, Jisu; , Pollacci, L., Rossetti, G., Sîrbu, A., Giannotti, F. & Pedreschi, G. (2022) Twitter data for migration studies. In Albert Ali Salah, Emre Eren Korkmaz, Tuba Bircan (Eds.): Data science for migration and mobility: Oxford University Press.
  7. Pötzschke, S., & Rinken, S. (2022). Migration Research in a Digitized World: Using Innovative Technology to Tackle Methodological Challenges (p. 220). Springer Nature.
  8. Recchi, E., & Tittel, K. (2023). The Empirical Study of Human Mobility: Potentials and Pitfalls of Using Traditional and Digital Data. In Handbook of Computational Social Science for Policy (pp. 437-464). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  9. Salah, Albert Ali; Korkmaz, Emre Eren; Bircan, Tuba (Eds.) (2022b): Data science for migration and mobility: Oxford University Press.
  10. Sîrbu, Alina; Andrienko, Gennady; Andrienko, Natalia; Boldrini, Chiara; Conti, Marco; Giannotti, Fosca et al. (2021): Human migration: the big data perspective. In Int J Data Sci Anal 11 (4), pp. 341–360. DOI: 10.1007/s41060-020-00213-5.
  11. Spyratos, S., Vespe, M., Natale, F., Weber, I., Zagheni, E., & Rango, M. (2018). Migration data using social media: a European perspective. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
  12. Tjaden, Jasper (2021): Measuring migration 2.0: a review of digital data sources. In CMS 9 (1). DOI: 10.1186/s40878-021-00273-x.
  13. Tjaden, Jasper (2023): Web scraping for migration and migrant integration studies: Introduction, application and potential use cases. International Migration Review. Forthcoming.
  14. Vieira, Carolina Coimbra; Fatehkia, Masoomali; Kiran Garimella, Weber, Ingmar; Zagheni, Emilio (2022): Using Facebook and LinkedIn data to study international mobility. In Albert Ali Salah, Emre Eren Korkmaz, Tuba Bircan (Eds.): Data science for migration and mobility: Oxford University Press.

2. Topical Themes

2.1. Migration stocks and flows

  1. Alencar, Amanda (2018): Refugee integration and social media: a local and experiential perspective. In Information, Communication & Society 21 (11), pp. 1588–1603. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2017.1340500.
  2. Alencar, Amanda; Kondova, Katerina; Ribbens, Wannes (2019): The smartphone as a lifeline: an exploration of refugees’ use of mobile communication technologies during their flight. In Media, Culture & Society 41 (6), pp. 828–844. DOI: 10.1177/0163443718813486.
  3. Alexander, Monica; Zagheni, Emilio; Polimis, Kivan (2019): The impact of Hurricane Maria on out-migration from Puerto Rico: Evidence from Facebook data: Center for Open Science.
  4. Borkert, Maren; Fisher, Karen E.; Yafi, Eiad (2018): The Best, the Worst, and the Hardest to Find: How People, Mobiles, and Social Media Connect Migrants In(to) Europe. In Social Media + Society 4 (1), 205630511876442. DOI: 10.1177/2056305118764428.
  5. Carammia, M., Iacus, S. M., & Wilkin, T. (2022). Forecasting asylum-related migration flows with machine learning and data at scale. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 1457.
  6. Dekker, Rianne; Engbersen, Godfried (2014): How social media transform migrant networks and facilitate migration. In Global Networks 14 (4), pp. 401–418. DOI: 10.1111/glob.12040.
  7. Dekker, Rianne; Engbersen, Godfried; Klaver, Jeanine; Vonk, Hanna (2018): Smart Refugees: How Syrian Asylum Migrants Use Social Media Information in Migration Decision-Making. In Social Media + Society 4 (1), 205630511876443. DOI: 10.1177/2056305118764439.
  8. Grubanov-Boskovic, Sara; Kalantaryan, Sona; Migali, Silvia; Scipioni, Marco (2022): The impact of the Internet on migration aspirations and intentions. In Migration Studies 9 (4), pp. 1807–1822. DOI: 10.1093/migration/mnab049.
  9. Hausmann, R.; Hinz, J.; Yildirim, MA. (2018): Measuring Venezuelan emigration with Twitter. Kiel: Kiel Working Paper.
  10. Hawelka, Bartosz; Sitko, Izabela; Beinat, Euro; Sobolevsky, Stanislav; Kazakopoulos, Pavlos; Ratti, Carlo (2014): Geo-located Twitter as proxy for global mobility patterns. In Cartography and geographic information science 41 (3), pp. 260–271. DOI: 10.1080/15230406.2014.890072.
  11. Jurdak, Raja; Zhao, Kun; Liu, Jiajun; AbouJaoude, Maurice; Cameron, Mark; Newth, David (2015): Understanding Human Mobility from Twitter. In PLOS ONE 10 (7), e0131469. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131469.
  12. Kim, J., Sîrbu, A., Giannotti, F., & Gabrielli, L. (2020, April). Digital footprints of international migration on twitter. In International symposium on intelligent data analysis (pp. 274-286). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  13. Leasure, D. R., Kashyap, R., Rampazzo, F., Dooley, C. A., Elbers, B., Bondarenko, M., … & Mills, M. C. (2023). Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data. Population and Development Review.
  14. Martín, Yago; Cutter, Susan L.; Li, Zhenlong; Emrich, Christopher T.; Mitchell, Jerry T. (2020): Using geotagged tweets to track population movements to and from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. In Population and Environment 42 (1), pp. 4–27. DOI: 10.1007/s11111-020-00338-6.
  15. Merisalo, Maria; Jauhiainen, Jussi S. (2021): Asylum-Related Migrants’ Social-Media Use, Mobility Decisions, and Resilience. In Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 19 (2), pp. 184–198. DOI: 10.1080/15562948.2020.1781991.
  16. Minora, Umberto; Belmonte, Martina; Bosco, Claudio; Johnston, Drew; Giraudy, Eugenia; Iacus, Stefano; Sermi, Francesco (2022a): Migration patterns, friendship networks, and the diaspora: the potential of Facebook Social Connectedness Index to anticipate displacement patterns induced by Russia invasion of Ukraine in the European Union.
  17. Minora, Umberto; Bosco, Claudio; Iacus, Stefano M.; Grubanov-Boskovic, Sara; Sermi, Francesco; Spyratos, Spyridon (2022b): The potential of Facebook advertising data for understanding flows of people from Ukraine to the European Union. In EPJ Data Sci. 11 (1). DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00370-6.
  18. Palotti, Joao; Adler, Natalia; Morales-Guzman, Alfredo; Villaveces, Jeffrey; Sekara, Vedran; Garcia Herranz, Manuel et al. (2020): Monitoring of the Venezuelan exodus through Facebook’s advertising platform. In PLOS ONE 15 (2), e0229175. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229175.
  19. Sanchez, Gabriella; Hoxhaj, Rezart; Nardin, Sabrina; Geddes, Andrew; Achilli, Luigi; Sona Kalantaryan, Rezart (2018): A study of the communication channels used by migrants and asylum seekers in Italy, with a particular focus on online and social media. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
  20. State, B.; Rodriguez, M.; Helbing, D.; Zagheni, E. (2014): Migration of Professionals to the U.S.: Evidence from LinkedIn Data. Switzerland: Springer.
  21. Spyratos, Spyridon; Vespe, Michele; Natale, Fabrizio; Weber, Ingmar; Zagheni, Emilio; Rango, Marzia (2019): Quantifying international human mobility patterns using Facebook Network data. In PLOS ONE 14 (10), e0224134. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224134.
  22. Zagheni, Emilio; Garimella, Venkata Rama Kiran; Weber, Ingmar; State, Bogdan (2014): Inferring international and internal migration patterns from Twitter data. In Chin-Wan Chung, Andrei Broder, Kyuseok Shim, Torsten Suel (Eds.): Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web. WWW ‘14: 23rd International World Wide Web Conference. Seoul Korea, 07 04 2014 11 04 2014. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 439–444.
  23. Zagheni, Emilio; Weber, Ingmar; Gummadi, Krishna (2017): Leveraging Facebook’s Advertising Platform to Monitor Stocks of Migrants. In Population and Development Review 43 (4), pp. 721–734. DOI: 10.1111/padr.12102.

2.2. Integration and discrimination

  1. Ayres, Ian; Banaji, Mahzarin; Jolls, Christine (2015): Race effects on eBay. In The RAND Journal of Economics 46 (4), pp. 891–917. DOI: 10.1111/1756-2171.12115.
  2. Dubois, Antoine; Zagheni, Emilio; Garimella, Kiran; Weber, Ingmar (2018): Studying Migrant Assimilation Through Facebook Interests. In. International Conference on Social Informatics: Springer, Cham, pp. 51–60. Available online at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-01159-8_5.
  3. Edelman, Benjamin; Luca, Michael; Svirsky, Dan (2017): Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment. In American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 9 (2), pp. 1–22. DOI: 10.1257/app.20160213.
  4. Jakobsson, Niklas; Lindholm, Henrik (2014): Ethnic Preferences in Internet Dating: A Field Experiment. In Marriage & Family Review 50 (4), pp. 307–317. DOI: 10.1080/01494929.2013.879554.
  5. Kim, J., Pratesi, F., Rossetti, G., Sîrbu, A., & Giannotti, F. (2022). Where do migrants and natives belong in a community: a Twitter case study and privacy risk analysis. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 13(1), 15.
  6. Kim, J., Sîrbu, A., Giannotti, F., Rossetti, G., & Rapoport, H. (2022). Origin and destination attachment: study of cultural integration on Twitter. EPJ Data Science, 11(1), 55.
  7. Lin, Ken-Hou; Lundquist, Jennifer (2013): Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education. In American Journal of Sociology 119 (1), pp. 183–215. DOI: 10.1086/673129.
  8. Tjaden, Jasper; Schwemmer, Carsten; Khadjavi, Menusch (2018): Ride with Me—Ethnic Discrimination, Social Markets, and the Sharing Economy. In European Sociological Review 34 (4), pp. 418–432. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcy024.
  9. Potârcă, Gina; Mills, Melinda (2015): Racial Preferences in Online Dating across European Countries. In European Sociological Review 31 (3), pp. 326–341. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcu093.
  10. Robnett, B.; Feliciano, C. (2011): Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters. In Social Forces 89 (3), pp. 807–828. DOI: 10.1093/sf/89.3.807.
  11. Stewart, Ian; Flores, René D.; Riffe, Timothy; Weber, Ingmar; Zagheni, Emilio (2019): Rock, Rap, or Reggaeton?: Assessing Mexican Immigrants’ Cultural Assimilation Using Facebook Data. In Ling Liu, Ryen White (Eds.): The World Wide Web Conference on - WWW ‘19. The World Wide Web Conference. San Francisco, CA, USA, 13.05.2019 - 17.05.2019. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, pp. 3258–3264.
  12. Zussman, Asaf (2013): Ethnic Discrimination: Lessons from the Israeli Online Market for Used Cars. In The Economic Journal 123 (572), F433-F468. DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12059.

2.3. Public discourse, hate speech

  1. Arcila-Calderón, C., Blanco-Herrero, D., Frías-Vázquez, M., & Seoane-Pérez, F. (2021). Refugees welcome? Online hate speech and sentiments in Twitter in Spain during the reception of the boat Aquarius. Sustainability, 13(5), 2728.
  2. Bursztyn, Leonardo; Egorov, Georgy; Enikolopov, Ruben; Petrova, Maria (2019): Social Media and Xenophobia: Evidence from Russia. Cambridge, MA.
  3. Czymara, Christian S.; Dochow-Sondershaus, Stephan; Drouhot, Lucas G.; Simsek, Müge; Spörlein, Christoph (2022): Catalyst of hate? Ethnic insulting on YouTube in the aftermath of terror attacks in France, Germany and the United Kingdom 2014–2017. In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, pp. 1–19. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2022.2100552.
  4. Ekman, Mattias (2019): Anti-immigration and racist discourse in social media. In European Journal of Communication 34 (6), pp. 606–618. DOI: 10.1177/0267323119886151.
  5. Hangartner, Dominik; Gennaro, Gloria; Alasiri, Sary; Bahrich, Nicholas; Bornhoft, Alexandra; Boucher, Joseph et al. (2021): Empathy-based counterspeech can reduce racist hate speech in a social media field experiment. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 118 (50). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2116310118.
  6. Heidenreich, Tobias; Eberl, Jakob-Moritz; Lind, Fabienne; Boomgaarden, Hajo (2020): Political migration discourses on social media: a comparative perspective on visibility and sentiment across political Facebook accounts in Europe. In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46 (7), pp. 1261–1280. DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2019.1665990.
  7. Müller, Karsten; Schwarz, Carlo (2022): From Hashtag to Hate Crime: Twitter and Anti-Minority Sentiment. In AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL: APPLIED ECONOMICS (FORTHCOMING).
  8. Rettberg, Jill Walker; Gajjala, Radhika (2016): Terrorists or cowards: negative portrayals of male Syrian refugees in social media. In Feminist Media Studies 16 (1), pp. 178–181. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2016.1120493.
  9. Sánchez-Holgado, Patricia, Javier J. Amores, and David Blanco-Herrero. “Online Hate Speech and Immigration Acceptance: A Study of Spanish Provinces.” Social Sciences 11.11 (2022): 515.
  10. Spörlein, Christoph; Schlueter, Elmar (2021): Ethnic Insults in YouTube Comments: Social Contagion and Selection Effects During the German “Refugee Crisis”. In European Sociological Review 37 (3), pp. 411–428. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcaa053.

2.4. Social media platform as data collection tool

  1. Chen, Julienne; Neo, Pearlyn (2019): Texting the waters: An assessment of focus groups conducted via the WhatsApp smartphone messaging application. In Methodological Innovations 12 (3), 205979911988427. DOI: 10.1177/2059799119884276.
  2. Fei, Jennifer; Wolff, Jessica; Hotard, Michael; Ingham, Hannah; Khanna, Saurabh; Lawrence, Duncan et al. (2022): Automated Chat Application Surveys Using Whatsapp: Evidence from Panel Surveys and a Mode Experiment. In SSRN Electronic Journal. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.4114839.
  3. Fei, Jennifer; Wolff, Jessica Sadye; Hotard, Michael; Ingham, Hannah; Khanna, Saurabh; Lawrence, Duncan et al. (2020): Automated Chat Application Surveys Using WhatsApp. In SocArXiv j9a2y (SocArXiv j9a2y).
  4. Gruchy, Thea de; Vearey, Jo; Opiti, Calvin; Mlotshwa, Langelihle; Manji, Karima; Hanefeld, Johanna (2021): Research on the move: exploring WhatsApp as a tool for understanding the intersections between migration, mobility, health and gender in South Africa. In Globalization and health 17 (1), p. 71. DOI: 10.1186/s12992-021-00727-y.
  5. Ndashimye, Felix; Hebie, Oumarou; Tjaden, Jasper (2022): Effectiveness of WhatsApp for Measuring Migration in Follow-Up Phone Surveys. Lessons from a Mode Experiment in Two Low-Income Countries during COVID Contact Restrictions. In Social Science Computer Review, 089443932211113. DOI: 10.1177/08944393221111340.
  6. Tjaden, Jasper; Haarmann, Esther; Savaskan, Nicolai (2022): Experimental evidence on improving COVID-19 vaccine outreach among migrant communities on social media. In Scientific reports 12 (1), p. 16256. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-20340-2.
  7. Pötzschke, Steffen; Braun, Michael (2017): Migrant Sampling Using Facebook Advertisements. In Social Science Computer Review 35 (5), pp. 633–653. DOI: 10.1177/0894439316666262.
  8. Pötzschke, Steffen; Weiß, Bernd (2021): Realizing a Global Survey of Emigrants through Facebook and Instagram.
  9. Reichel, David; Morales, Laura (2017): Surveying immigrants without sampling frames - evaluating the success of alternative field methods. In CMS 5 (1), p. 1. DOI: 10.1186/s40878-016-0044-9.

3. Methods

  1. Alexander, Monica; Polimis, Kivan; Zagheni, Emilio (2022): Combining Social Media and Survey Data to Nowcast Migrant Stocks in the United States. In Popul Res Policy Rev 41 (1), pp. 1–28. DOI: 10.1007/s11113-020-09599-3.
  2. Chi, G., Lin, F., Chi, G., & Blumenstock, J. (2020). A general approach to detecting migration events in digital trace data. PloS one, 15(10), e0239408.
  3. Grow, André; Perrotta, Daniela; Del Fava, Emanuele; Cimentada, Jorge; Rampazzo, Francesco; Gil‐Clavel, Sofia et al. (2022): Is Facebook’s advertising data accurate enough for use in social science research? Insights from a cross‐national online survey. In J. R. Stat. Soc. A 185 (S2). DOI: 10.1111/rssa.12948.
  4. Hsiao, Yuan; Fiorio, Lee; Wakefield, Jonathan; Zagheni, Emilio (2023): Modeling the Bias of Digital Data: An Approach to Combining Digital With Official Statistics to Estimate and Predict Migration Trends. In Sociological Methods & Research, 004912412211401. DOI: 10.1177/00491241221140144.
  5. Rampazzo, F., Bijak, J., Vitali, A., Weber, I., & Zagheni, E. (2021). A framework for estimating migrant stocks using digital traces and survey data: An application in the United Kingdom. Demography, 58(6), 2193-2218.
  6. Ribeiro, Filipe N.; Benevenuto, Fabrício; Zagheni, Emilio (2020): How Biased is the Population of Facebook Users? Comparing the Demographics of Facebook Users with Census Data to Generate Correction Factors. In : 12th ACM Conference on Web Science. New York, NY, USA. New York, NY, USA: ACM.

4. Ethics

  1. EU Data Protection Supervisor (2019): Formal consultation on EASO’s social media monitoring reports (case 2018-1083). Brussels.
  2. Komito, L. (2011). Social media and migration: Virtual community 2.0. Journal of the American society for information science and technology, 62(6), 1075-1086.
  3. Lamanna, F., Lenormand, M., Salas-Olmedo, M. H., Romanillos, G., Gonçalves, B., & Ramasco, J. J. (2018). Immigrant community integration in world cities. PloS one, 13(3), e0191612.
  4. Latonero, M., & Kift, P. (2018). On digital passages and borders: Refugees and the new infrastructure for movement and control. Social Media+ Society, 4(1), 2056305118764432.
  5. Leurs, K., & Prabhakar, M. (2018). Doing digital migration studies: Methodological considerations for an emerging research focus. Qualitative research in European migration studies, 247-266.
  6. Mahoney, J., Le Louvier, K., & Lawson, S. (2022). The ethics of social media analytics in migration studies. In Information and Communications Technology in Support of Migration (pp. 333-346). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  7. Mazzoli, M., Diechtiareff, B., Tugores, A., Wives, W., Adler, N., Colet, P., & Ramasco, J. J. (2020). Migrant mobility flows characterized with digital data. PloS one, 15(3), e0230264.
  8. Salah, Albert Ali; Canca, Cansu; Erman, Baris (2022a): Ethical and legal concerns on data science for large scale human mobility. In Albert Ali Salah, Emre Eren Korkmaz, Tuba Bircan (Eds.): Data science for migration and mobility: Oxford University Press.
  9. Sandberg, M., Rossi, L., Galis, V., & Bak Jørgensen, M. (2022). Research Methodologies and Ethical Challenges in Digital Migration Studies: Caring For (Big) Data? (p. 262). Springer Nature.
Jasper Dag Tjaden
Jasper Dag Tjaden
Professor for Applied Social Research and Public Policy

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