(TA2.07) Innovative use of Social Media for Remote Sensing and SDG Monitoring

Organiser(s): Qatar Computing Research Institute; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Social media has become ubiquitous with billions of people using platforms such as Facebook, WeChat, or WhatsApp. An important aspect that social media provides is the real time access to digital trace data. This offers complementary strengths to existing, expensive and typically slow paced data from surveys (e.g. migration statistics or disaster impact assessment). In particular the need for near real-time data analysis that does not rely on face-to-face interactions has been made clear by the current pandemic. The session is meant to generate a discussion on the role of social media in various sensing and monitoring tasks related to SDGs. We bring together experts from NSOs, international organizations, and academia working on cutting edge research using social media in an innovative way to address some of these issues. Our speakers represent a diverse set of backgrounds, including Computer Science, Sociology, and Business. The session introduces novel, not-so-obvious aspects of using social media data that go beyond simplistic tweet counting or sentiment analysis. A particular emphasis is on ways to complement existing sources of data from NSO’s, which can help in real time sensing and monitoring SDG indicators. Examples of topics to be discussed include (i) the use of public Twitter data to complement disaster response efforts by actively reaching out to users for information, (ii) using Facebook advertisements to survey large populations of people at a fraction of cost of the traditional surveys, and (iii) debiasing social media data and combining it with survey data to enable effective measurements at scale. At least one of the speakers will share her experience with listening to citizen concerns through social media during the pandemic. The goal of the session is to enable the flow of ideas from the latest advances and experiences to a diverse audience, including technologists, journalists, policy makers and academics. The selected speakers will all present ideas that have practical relevance and could be scaled up, hopefully leading to meaningful engagement and follow-up. The panel would be organized in collaboration with the IUSSP Panel on “Digital Demography” (https://iussp.org/en/panel/digital-demography).