Apidays Singapore 2024 - Building Digital Trust in a Digital Economy by Veron...
Tracking Emigration from Conflict Areas using Social Media
1. Tracking Emigration from Conflict Areas
using Social Media
Cody Buntain, Erin McGrath, Jen Golbeck
{cbuntain,golbeck}@cs.umd.edu, ecmcgrat@umd.edu
HCIL+START, University of Maryland
SMDR’16
17 May 2016
11. 11
Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
Initial Twitter data set:
4 billion tweets across 1 April 2013-31 Dec. 2015
from Twitter’s 1% public sample.
12. 12
Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
Build list of candidate residents:
Find all geo-coded tweets in the data set
that were posted from the target country.
13. 13
Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
Refine candidate residents:
Identify the 100 most common self-reported locations
that fall within the target country.
Retain users with these locations or any location that
mentions the target country.
14. Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
syria
سوريا
سوريه
سورية
دمشق
حلب
damascus
damascus, syria
damascus,syria
damascus - syria
Ten most common locations in Syria:
“Syria” in Arabic
“Damascus”
“Aleppo”
15. 15
Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
Pull tweets for each candidate resident:
For each candidate resident, extract all that user’s
tweets from the 1% sample.
16. 16
Emigration from
Conflict/Crisis Zones
Identifying Emigrating Users
Identify potential emigrants:
Remove all users whose first geo-coded tweet is
outside the target country and whose last tweet is
within the target country.
24. 24
Preliminary Results Expanding Syrian Data Set
Twitter API
Pull past 3,200 tweets for each account:
Use Twitter’s API to pull the most recent 3,200 tweets
for each user who has posted in Syria
29. 29
Limitations
2. Validity
Only using a sample of
Twitter data.
Social media users are
often younger, maybe
more male.
Data reveals some emigration paths
31. 31
Other Open
Questions
2. Most popular
destinations
Turkey
Lebanon
Australia
Canada
Ireland
Israel
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
0 5 10 15 20 25
Syrian destinations
32. Tracking Emigration from Conflict Areas
using Social Media
Cody Buntain
cbuntain@cs.umd.edu
@codybuntain
www.coretx.net
SMDR’16
17 May 2016
Thank you!
Questions?
33. 33
- Slide 1: Cover photo
- "A group of Syrian migrants charged their cellphones using a television station's satellite truck outside the Keleti train station last week
in Budapest." Sept. 8 2015
- By Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
- (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/reporters-notebook/migrants/phone-charging-stations)
- Slide 2: Migration photo
- Frontex Border police
- (http://frontex.europa.eu/trends-and-routes/migratory-routes-map/)
- Slide 3: top left photo
- Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
- Here's What Syrian Refugees Bring On Their Long, Dangerous Journeys
- (http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-syrian-refugees-bring-on-their-long-dangero-1730050522)
- Slide 3: bottom left photo
- Muhammed Muheisen, AP for TIME
- A Syrian refugee shows his phone, after arriving on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos. Oct.
2, 2015
- (http://time.com/4062120/see-how-smartphones-have-become-a-lifeline-for-refugees/)
- Slide 3: Right photo
- Migrants and refugees recharge cellphones as they wait to cross the border of Greece and Macedonia, near Idomeni, Greece, Nov.
9, 2015.
- By Sakis Mitrolidis / AFP / Getty Images
- (http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/1/18/for-asylum-seekers-a-cell-phone-is-a-bridge-to-the-future-and-the-past.html)
- Slide 4: Tweet map
- From (http://onemilliontweetmap.com/)
Image Credits
