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Nowcasting Daily Population Displacement in Ukraine through Social Media Advertising Data

Bibliographic Data

ID4120913
AuthorsDouglas Ryan Leasure (0000-0002-8768-2811, corresponding author), Ridhi Kashyap (0000-0003-0615-2868), Francesco Rampazzo (0000-0002-5071-7048), Claire A Dooley (0000-0003-2415-9895), Benjamin Elbers (0000-0001-5392-3448), Maria Bondarenko (0000-0003-4958-6551), Megan Verhagen (0000-0003-2746-0309), A Frey (0000-0002-5044-1432), Jiani Yan (0000-0002-9379-1547), Evelina T Akimova (0000-0001-8733-3745), Masoomali Fatehkia (0000-0002-2387-9084), Robert Trigwell (0000-0002-6782-4405), Andrew J Tatem (0000-0002-7270-941X), Ingmar Weber (0000-0003-4169-2579), Melinda C Mills (0000-0003-1704-0001)
Year2023
Volume49
Issue2
Pages231-254
Publication date2023-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePopulation and Development Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0098-7921 • E-ISSN: 1728-4457
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/padr.12558
OpenAlexW4362677642
LanguageEN
Citations received27
References cited29

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

Advertising · Business · Cartography · Demographic economics · Displaced person · Displacement (psychology · Economics · Forced migration · Geography · Internally displaced person · Nowcasting · Political science · Population · Refugee · Scale (ratio · Social media · Sociology · COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing · Data-Driven Disease Surveillance · Demography · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Psychology

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Unique citing works27
Citations per year13,5
Citation span2024 - 2026 (3)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 24
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