It has long been assumed that people willingly pour their lives out into the open on Facebook.  Research from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research wanted to find out if the information we share on the platform can help to determine cultural similarities between countries.

The researchers explain that migration plays a key role in shaping any cultural similarities that exist between countries, but the difficulties in actually quantifying culture make studying the influence of migration challenging.  Often any attempts to do this would be made via surveys, but these are costly and can be difficult to apply to sufficiently large numbers across a wide range of countries.

Social data

As such, the researchers examined the possible role social media data can play in augmenting any survey data that is collected.  Their approach is based on previous work that showed how food and drink preferences could be a good proxy for cultural similarities between countries.  They gathered data on the top 50 food and drink preferences for a country from Facebook’s advertising platform, with the method then tested on 16 countries.

The results reveal that there was a strong correlation between the food and drink interests between two countries and immigration patterns.  In other words, food and drink preferences generally align most between countries where the flow of people is highest.

What’s more, the findings chime with earlier survey data, with the researchers suggesting that they nicely highlight the asymmetries that exist between countries.  For instance, they show that the most popular foods in Mexico are also popular in the United States, but the reverse is not the case, which demonstrates the greater flow of migration from Mexico to America than the other way.

They believe that the results show how immigrants shape the culture of their host country, and they hope to conduct further work into the method to refine it yet more to see if there are other factors beyond food and drink that may provide similarly useful proxies.

“We analyze data from Facebook users about their food and drink preferences to measure the cultural similarity between 16 countries,” the researchers conclude. “When compared with official migration data, we observe that countries with more immigrants show a higher cultural similarity between the origin and destination countries.”