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 another.
The interactive Social Connectedness Index Map brings this data to life by visualizing how strongly any country, state, province or county is connected to every other part of the world. Select any location on the globe and the map instantly recolors to reveal where its strongest social ties lie. Darker shades indicate a higher probability that a Facebook user in your chosen location is friends with someone living there.
You can search directly for any available location or simply click on the map to make a selection. Once a place has been chosen, a control panel allows you to focus on a single country, rescale the colour range to the current view, or adjust the baseline percentile used in the visualization. These options make it much easier to uncover subtle regional differences that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the strongest global connections.
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