Communities of Human Migration in Social Media: An Experiment in Social Sensing

Abstract

Migration has been key to the success of humans as it can improve both the lives of migrants and the economy of destination regions. However, it can also overstretch the resources of hosting regions. Therefore, an accurate assessment of immigration data is important to both immigrants and governments. In this work, we detect and relate communities of migration by analyzing discussions from social media and compare them with official immigration records. Our goal is two-fold. First, it measures the agreement between the official migration numbers and popular perception. Second, the measure of individuals’ feelings from social-media data may be used by governments to guide immigration policy-making. This paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge in social sensing; it shows that people’s perspectives on migration, as reflected in social media, is mismatched with reality.