Mapping language literacy at scale: a case study on Facebook

Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today’s digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of online populations for more than 160 countries and regions across the world, including many low-resourced countries where off...

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Published inEPJ data science Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 13 - 21
Main Authors Lin, Yu-Ru, Wu, Shaomei, Mason, Winter
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.12.2023
Springer Nature B.V
SpringerOpen
Subjects
Complexity
Computer Appl. in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Computer Science
Cross-language measurement
Data-driven Science
Empowerment
Global inequalities
Global literacy
Information accessibility
Language
Literacy
Modeling and Theory Building
Regular Article
Skills
Social media demography
Social networks
Socioeconomics
Global literacy
Social media demography
Cross-language measurement
Global inequalities
Information accessibility
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Summary:Literacy is one of the most fundamental skills for people to access and navigate today’s digital environment. This work systematically studies the language literacy skills of online populations for more than 160 countries and regions across the world, including many low-resourced countries where official literacy data are particularly sparse. Leveraging public data on Facebook, we develop a population-level literacy estimate for the online population that is based on aggregated and de-identified public posts written by adult Facebook users globally, significantly improving both the coverage and resolution of existing literacy tracking data. We found that, on Facebook, women collectively show higher language literacy than men in many countries, but substantial gaps remain in Africa and Asia. Further, our analysis reveals a considerable regional gap within a country that is associated with multiple socio-technical inequalities, suggesting an “inequality paradox” – where the online language skill disparity interacts with offline socioeconomic inequalities in complex ways. These findings have implications for global women’s empowerment and socioeconomic inequalities.
ISSN:2193-1127
2193-1127
DOI:10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00388-4