Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in developing countries through Facebook advertising data

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that Facebook advertising data can effectively map urban socioeconomic inequalities at a fine spatial scale across diverse developing and developed cities, offering a timely alternative to traditional data sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using Facebook advertising audience estimates to predict socioeconomic conditions in urban areas, applicable across different resource settings.

Findings

Facebook data accurately predicts socioeconomic status within cities.

Predictive performance is consistent across high and low-resource settings.

Using data from users over 25 improves mapping accuracy.

Abstract

Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the number one Sustainable Development Goal of the UN 2030 Agenda. To monitor the progress towards such an ambitious target, reliable, up-to-date and fine-grained measurements of socioeconomic indicators are necessary. When it comes to socioeconomic development, novel digital traces can provide a complementary data source to overcome the limits of traditional data collection methods, which are often not regularly updated and lack adequate spatial resolution. In this study, we collect publicly available and anonymous advertising audience estimates from Facebook to predict socioeconomic conditions of urban residents, at a fine spatial granularity, in four large urban areas: Atlanta (USA), Bogot\'a (Colombia), Santiago (Chile), and Casablanca (Morocco). We find that behavioral attributes inferred from the Facebook marketing platform can accurately map the socioeconomic status of residential areas within cities, and that predictive performance is comparable in both high and low-resource settings. We also show that training a model on attributes of adult Facebook users, aged more than 25, leads to a more accurate mapping of socioeconomic conditions in all cities. Our work provides additional evidence of the value of social advertising media data to measure human development.