![[OC] See how three billion Facebook users move across 181 countries](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/nz8l9vkjidve1-1229x1536.png "[OC] See how three billion Facebook users move across 181 countries")
Kathleen Kingsbury, the head of Times Opinion, writes:
"This great global migration is a staggeringly complex phenomenon with countless causes and implications. Yet perhaps no other issue is as pressing and as little understood by the average citizen and policymaker alike. Government records differ wildly from country to country, surges in illegal immigration are often only evident in retrospect and information isn't collected at all in some corners of the world. As is the case with so many other things, we don't even know what we don't know.
"Until now. In the maps below, Times Opinion can provide the clearest picture to date of how people move across the globe: a record of permanent migration to and from 181 countries based on a single, consistent source of information, for every month from the beginning of 2019 through the end of 2022. These estimates are drawn not from government records but from the location data of three billion anonymized Facebook users all over the world.
"The analysis — the result of new research published on Wednesday from Meta, the University of Hong Kong and Harvard University — reveals migration's true global sweep. And yes, it excludes business travelers and tourists: Only people who remain in their destination country for more than a year are counted as migrants here."
Read our analysis of this new data set on global human migration here, for free, even without a Times subscription. Or explore the data yourself (also for free) with this interactive map.
Posted by nytopinion
11 Comments
Data source: Meta
Data tools: R, Svelte, Javascript, WebGL (maps); Adobe Illustrator (graphic)
While kind of interesting, “Facebook users with location sharing enabled” probably isn’t an all too representative group for humanity and also probably one that has a relatively high probability of moving to the US
Is Facebook data really accurate to real life? I wouldn’t doubt these numbers but using Facebook users doesn’t seem particularly diligent to me, especially with the sheer amount of bots and fake people
Trumpers : *see! The great replacement*
Just because my auntie who lives in south Italy changed her location to San Francisco it doesn’t mean she actually lives there
All that traveling to have your kid shot in a school
i love how it looks like they all descended onto kansas
It’s the bots and NPCs, I don’t know anyone personally that still uses Facebook.
Well the US is also fucking huge… if we took into the account the entire size of population of a country and its area there would be probably more sought after countries by that metrics.
The Chinese bots astroturfing reddit will hate this.
Would be more interesting if the stat was proportional to current population. Say in Denmark you get 200k immigrants in 2022, that’s proportionately around 3 times more than the immigrants to the us in 2022