Facebook/Instagram: Measuring the Digital Divide: Using Existing Data Sources and New Data Collection to Understand Between-Country Differences.

Representatives from Facebook and Instagram will be talking about what it’s like to work at both organisations and will discuss current areas of research including:

 Measuring the Digital Divide: Using Existing Data Sources and New Data Collection to Understand Between-Country Differences.

The Internet has already changed many aspects of peoples’ lives in developed economies and has provided far-reaching economic and social benefits. Extending these opportunities is critical to accelerating economic and social growth in developing economies as well. Many international organizations have set ambitious plans to promote Internet access globally; they pore over reports and expend considerable money, time and talent exploring new ways to connect the unconnected (e.g., blimps, drones, satellites). But raw enthusiasm and aggregate statistics fail to capture the reality of the digital divide in the developing world.

Facebook’s commitment to connecting the developing world includes a desire to understand the complexity of the issue as it relates to the cultural, structural and technological inequalities between and within countries. This approach requires bringing together insights from large number of publicly available data sources that employ different methodologies to understanding the multi-faceted nature of the digital divide, even when the assembled sources of data reach different conclusions.

In this talk, researchers from Facebook will discuss the difficulties and limitations often faced by aggregating numerous country-specific data sources together to measure the extent, cause and consequences of differences in Internet adoption between countries and populations. They will explain how Facebook evaluates the quality of existing publicly available data sources (e.g., national statistics, academic studies and industry reports), aggregates multiple sources to obtain relevant estimates and supplement data “holes” with original data collection efforts. The multi-faceted approach allows Facebook to conduct scalable and comprehensive comparative analyses at multiple levels, which in turn leads to more culturally-sensitive and context-specific approaches for bridging the digital divide.

Free pizza in the UG social area at 12.45pm!