Facebook Social Connectedness Index: Global Social Ties at Subnational Resolution

An anonymized snapshot of all active Facebook users and their friendship networks measures the intensity of connectedness between locations. The Social Connectedness Index (SCI) quantifies the relative probability that two individuals from different geographies are Facebook friends. This release from AI for Good at Meta, updated in May 2026, provides expanded global coverage and finer geographic resolution across 178 countries.

Use Cases

• Modeling migration patterns based on the probability of social ties between regions.
• Analyzing regional economic integration based on social connectedness metrics.
• Studying the spread of information or cultural trends through social networks across geographies.
• Informing public policy on community resilience and social capital using quantified social ties.

Strengths

• Covers 178 countries with subnational geographic resolution.
• Based on an anonymized snapshot of all active Facebook users, providing a large-scale measure.
• Includes companion code for generating maps and is supported by peer-reviewed academic citations.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and platform-specific bias inherent to Facebook's user base.

Provenance

Source

AI for Good at Meta

Collection Method

Constructed from an anonymized snapshot of Facebook friendship networks.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-21 16:04:11.273110

Geography

Global, covering 178 countries with subnational units.