Analysis of Facebook user data with a specialized algorithm enabled tracking of global migration patterns in 2022, identifying 39.1 million people moving between 181 countries.

Researchers from Meta, the parent company of the social media platform, used anonymized data from more than 3 billion Facebook users to track and estimate global migration patterns.

The disappearance of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is a largely neglected human rights challenge,” Madi stated.

New research from the University of Georgia suggests that the spread of baker’s yeast is linked to past human migration, according to a UGA press release. The research pointed to ...

Ancient footprints challenge the timeline of human arrival in North America, suggesting people were here much earlier than ...

By analyzing both genetic variations in human gut bacteria and linguistic evidence, scientists found that people migrated to the Pacific Islands approximately 5,000 years ago from Taiwan, two papers ...

How Facebook data can help track human migration patterns. Chris Stokel-Walker . Fri, May 2, 2025, 6:17 AM 3 min read. In This Article: META .

A new study from Meta uses anonymized data from billions of users to track international migration in near real time—offering faster, scalable insights where official statistics fall short.