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Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data

Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data
Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data

In times of crisis, real-time data mapping population displacements are invaluable for targeted humanitarian response. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes including nearly 6 million refugees flowing across the border in just a few weeks, but information was scarce regarding displaced and vulnerable populations who remained inside Ukraine. We leveraged social media data from Facebook's advertising platform in combination with preconflict population data to build a real-time monitoring system to estimate subnational population sizes every day disaggregated by age and sex. Using this approach, we estimated that 5.3 million people had been internally displaced away from their baseline administrative region in the first three weeks after the start of the conflict. Results revealed four distinct displacement patterns: large-scale evacuations, refugee staging areas, internal areas of refuge, and irregular dynamics. While the use of social media provided one of the only quantitative estimates of internal displacement in the conflict setting in virtual real time, we conclude by acknowledging risks and challenges of these new data streams for the future.

0098-7921
231-254
Leasure, Douglas R.
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Kashyap, Ridhi
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Rampazzo, Francesco
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Dooley, Claire A.
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Elbers, Benjamin
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Bondarenko, Maksym
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Verhagen, Mark
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Frey, Arun
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Yan, Jiani
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Akimova, Evelina T.
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Fatehkia, Masoomali
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Trigwell, Robert
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Tatem, Andrew J.
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Weber, Ingmar
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Mills, Melinda C.
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Leasure, Douglas R.
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Kashyap, Ridhi
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Rampazzo, Francesco
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Dooley, Claire A.
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Elbers, Benjamin
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Bondarenko, Maksym
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Verhagen, Mark
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Frey, Arun
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Yan, Jiani
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Akimova, Evelina T.
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Fatehkia, Masoomali
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Trigwell, Robert
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Tatem, Andrew J.
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Weber, Ingmar
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Mills, Melinda C.
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Leasure, Douglas R., Kashyap, Ridhi, Rampazzo, Francesco, Dooley, Claire A., Elbers, Benjamin, Bondarenko, Maksym, Verhagen, Mark, Frey, Arun, Yan, Jiani, Akimova, Evelina T., Fatehkia, Masoomali, Trigwell, Robert, Tatem, Andrew J., Weber, Ingmar and Mills, Melinda C. (2023) Nowcasting daily population displacement in Ukraine through social media advertising data. Population and Development Review, 49 (2), 231-254. (doi:10.1111/padr.12558).

Record type: Article

Abstract

In times of crisis, real-time data mapping population displacements are invaluable for targeted humanitarian response. The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, forcibly displaced millions of people from their homes including nearly 6 million refugees flowing across the border in just a few weeks, but information was scarce regarding displaced and vulnerable populations who remained inside Ukraine. We leveraged social media data from Facebook's advertising platform in combination with preconflict population data to build a real-time monitoring system to estimate subnational population sizes every day disaggregated by age and sex. Using this approach, we estimated that 5.3 million people had been internally displaced away from their baseline administrative region in the first three weeks after the start of the conflict. Results revealed four distinct displacement patterns: large-scale evacuations, refugee staging areas, internal areas of refuge, and irregular dynamics. While the use of social media provided one of the only quantitative estimates of internal displacement in the conflict setting in virtual real time, we conclude by acknowledging risks and challenges of these new data streams for the future.

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Population Development Rev - 2023 - Leasure - Nowcasting Daily Population Displacement in Ukraine through Social Media - Version of Record
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Accepted/In Press date: 2023
e-pub ahead of print date: 6 April 2023
Published date: 6 April 2023
Additional Information: Funding Information: This data collection, analysis, and report were produced as a joint effort between the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS; University of Oxford), Qatar Computing Research Institute (Hamad Bin Khalifa University), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, WorldPop (University of Southampton), and the United Nations International Organization for Migration. This project was approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford (SSH_SBS_C1A_21_37). We thank Brian McDonald and Mohamed Bakr from the UN Migration Agency and Alessandro Sorichetta from WorldPop for discussions in the first weeks of the humanitarian crisis. We want to acknowledge additional LCDS members and others for their support of this work including Per Block, Jen Comiskey, Jennifer Beam Dowd, Per Engzell, Ryan Gray, Clayton Leasure, Saul Newman, Andrea Tilstra, and Bo Zhao. This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant RC‐2018‐003, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under Grant INV‐002697, the European Research Council under Advanced Grant 835079, and the Qatar Foundation. Funding Information: This data collection, analysis, and report were produced as a joint effort between the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (LCDS; University of Oxford), Qatar Computing Research Institute (Hamad Bin Khalifa University), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, WorldPop (University of Southampton), and the United Nations International Organization for Migration. This project was approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford (SSH_SBS_C1A_21_37). We thank Brian McDonald and Mohamed Bakr from the UN Migration Agency and Alessandro Sorichetta from WorldPop for discussions in the first weeks of the humanitarian crisis. We want to acknowledge additional LCDS members and others for their support of this work including Per Block, Jen Comiskey, Jennifer Beam Dowd, Per Engzell, Ryan Gray, Clayton Leasure, Saul Newman, Andrea Tilstra, and Bo Zhao. This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant RC-2018-003, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under Grant INV-002697, the European Research Council under Advanced Grant 835079, and the Qatar Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Population and Development Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Population Council.

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 476744
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/476744
ISSN: 0098-7921
PURE UUID: 7cac10f2-b2a9-4381-9262-3ee139538c02
ORCID for Douglas R. Leasure: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-8768-2811
ORCID for Maksym Bondarenko: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0003-4958-6551
ORCID for Andrew J. Tatem: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-7270-941X

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Date deposited: 12 May 2023 17:01
Last modified: 18 Mar 2024 03:48

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Contributors

Author: Douglas R. Leasure ORCID iD
Author: Ridhi Kashyap
Author: Francesco Rampazzo
Author: Claire A. Dooley
Author: Benjamin Elbers
Author: Mark Verhagen
Author: Arun Frey
Author: Jiani Yan
Author: Evelina T. Akimova
Author: Masoomali Fatehkia
Author: Robert Trigwell
Author: Andrew J. Tatem ORCID iD
Author: Ingmar Weber
Author: Melinda C. Mills

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