Laboratory

Population Dynamics and Sustainable Well-Being

At a Glance Projects Publications Team

Project

Demographic Differential Uses of Social Media, Social Network Sites, and Crowdsourced Platforms

Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Robert Gordon Rinderknecht, Ole Hexel, Emilio Zagheni, Beatriz Sofía Gil Clavel (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands); in Collaboration with Ingmar Weber (Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany), Kari Haranko (Aalto University, Finland), Kiran Garimella (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, Cambridge, USA), Fabrício Benevenuto, Marisa Vasconcelos (both: Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), Filipe Nunes Ribeiro (Federal University of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil), Wenqing Qian (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA)

Detailed Description

Social network sites (SNS) are an important part of many people’s lives, offering opportunities to connect with family, friends, acquaintances, or individuals who share similar interests, irrespective of the physical distance between them. SNS are therefore becoming increasingly important when studying the connections between technologies and social interactions, practices, and structures. Existing studies on SNS have focused on their social relevance, but little is known about the demographic differentials in SNS use and what they say about differential engagement with digital technologies.

In this project, we analyze differential SNS use and online interest across demographic groups worldwide. The goal is to understand variations in digital engagement and their social implications. Our data come from online platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Weibo, complemented by representative sources of information to validate findings from passively collected SNS data.

In a first study, we examined global digital gender gaps and highlighted the role of age, extending prior analyses of demographic differences in Facebook adoption. We showed that gender disparities in SNS use are shaped by age and qualitative differences in engagement. For example, we found that women maintain larger networks of close friends than men and are more likely to remain active on Facebook when away from their hometown. These findings provide a nuanced view of demographic differentials in digital access and social connectivity. In a second study, we leveraged Facebook ads data to conduct a large-scale analysis of the global gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). We curated Facebook users’ interests in STEM and non-STEM college majors worldwide to quantify the gender balance in disciplinary interests. Despite the platform’s female bias, males express more interest in STEM majors on Facebook. Within STEM, life sciences and mathematics show higher female engagement, while more males express interest in engineering and technology. A comparison of our results with the Global Gender Gap Report shows that the Facebook-based estimates correlate strongly with official statistics and expand coverage to countries not included in traditional surveys. We also conducted a detailed case study of Brazil, which showed that women’s interest in STEM declines with age and higher education, consistent with national data, thus highlighting persistent inequalities in the Brazilian context.

In another study, we validated LinkedIn ads data against official sources from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine gender trends in employment in the United States. We found that the gender gap in employment is fairly similar across locations, but varies strongly across industries and, to a lesser extent, across skills. Male representation rises with age, suggesting generational shifts. Moreover, compositional changes in the industry structure (and related skills) of US cities may be the driver of differentials in gender gaps in employment.

As we extended our project beyond SNS platforms, we provided similar analyses of crowdsourced labor platforms (i.e., Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Prolific), focusing on how data on the time-use patterns of respondents on these platforms differ from representative US data just before widespread social distancing in the winter of 2020. We show that respondents recruited from these crowdsourced platforms are more socially isolated and homebound than the broader US population.

Publications

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Vasconcelos, M.:

Characterizing global gender gaps in STEM using Facebook data

In: 20th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics, ISSI 2025: June 23-27, 2025, Yerevan, Armenia; proceedings: volume 1, 417–431. Yerevan: ISSI. (2025)    

Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Mulder, C. H.:

Does Twitter data mirror the European North–South family ties divide? A comparative analysis of tweets about family

Population Research and Policy Review 43:4, 1–24. (2024)    

Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Grow, A.; Bijlsma, M. J.:

Migration policies and immigrants’ language acquisition in EU-15: evidence from Twitter

Population and Development Review 49:3, 469–497. (2023)    

Qian, W.; Hexel, O.; Zagheni, E.; Kashyap, R.; Weber, I. G.:

Demographic inequalities in digital spaces in China: the case of Weibo

In: Workshop Proceedings of the 17th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-23): Limassol, Cyprus, June 5th - 8th, 2023, 1–6. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. (2023)    

Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.; Bordone, V.:

Close social networks among older adults: the online and offline perspectives

Population Research and Policy Review 41:3, 1111–1135. (2022)    

Grow, A.; Perrotta, D.; Del Fava, E.; Cimentada, J.; Rampazzo, F.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.; Flores, R. D.; Ventura, I.; Weber, I. G.:

Is Facebook's advertising data accurate enough for use in social science research? Insights from a cross-national online survey

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society/A 185:S2, S343–S363. (2022)    

Coimbra Vieira, C.; Vasconcelos, M.:

Using Facebook ads data to assess gender balance in STEM: evidence from Brazil

In: WWW'21: companion proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, 145–153. New York: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). (2021)    

Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.; Bordone, V.:

Close social networks among older adults: the online and offline perspectives

MPIDR Working Paper WP-2020-035. (2020)    

Ribeiro, F. N.; Benevenuto, F.; Zagheni, E.:

How biased is the population of Facebook users? Comparing the demographics of Facebook users with census data to generate correction factors

In: WebSci '20: 12th ACM Conference on Web Science, Southampton, UK, 6-10 July 2020, 325–334. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. (2020)    

Alburez-Gutierrez, D.; Aref, S.; Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Grow, A.; Negraia, D. V.; Zagheni, E.:

Demography in the digital era: new data sources for population research

In: Smart statistics for smart applications : book of short papers SIS2019, 23–30. Pearson. (2019)    

Gil-Clavel, B. S.; Zagheni, E.:

Demographic differentials in Facebook usage around the world

In: Proceedings of the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2019): 11-14 June 2019, Munich, Germany, 647–650. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. (2019)    

Haranko, K.; Zagheni, E.; Garimella, K.; Weber, I. G.:

Professional gender gaps across US cities

In: Proceedings of the 12th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018): 25-28 June 2018, Stanford, California, 604–607. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. (2018)    

Weber, I. G.; Kashyap, R.; Zagheni, E.:

Using advertising audience estimates to improve global development statistics

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries 1:2, 1–9. (2018)