The Map of Global Friendship
Social Connectedness Index Map St. Louis, Missouri and Bosnia and Herzegovina are separated by more than 5,000 miles. Yet Facebook friendship data reveals that the two places share remarkably strong social ties. An unusually large number of people in St. Louis have Facebook friends in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The explanation lies in the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees settled in St. Louis, creating the largest Bosnian community per capita outside Europe. Decades later, those family relationships, friendships and community networks remain so strong that they stand out as one of the most striking patterns in Meta's global dataset of social connections. The Social Connectedness Index (SCI) , developed by Meta's Data for Good team, was designed to measure these otherwise invisible links between places. Using anonymized Facebook friendship data, the SCI calculates the relative probability that a person in one location is friends with someone in ano...
