Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Doha, Qatar.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Feb 21;15(2):e0229175. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229175. eCollection 2020.
Venezuela is going through the worst economical, political and social crisis in its modern history. Basic products like food or medicine are scarce and hyperinflation is combined with economic depression. This situation is creating an unprecedented refugee and migrant crisis in the region. Governments and international agencies have not been able to consistently leverage reliable information using traditional methods. Therefore, to organize and deploy any kind of humanitarian response, it is crucial to evaluate new methodologies to measure the number and location of Venezuelan refugees and migrants across Latin America. In this paper, we propose to use Facebook's advertising platform as an additional data source for monitoring the ongoing crisis. We estimate and validate national and sub-national numbers of refugees and migrants and break-down their socio-economic profiles to further understand the complexity of the phenomenon. Although limitations exist, we believe that the presented methodology can be of value for real-time assessment of refugee and migrant crises world-wide.
委内瑞拉正经历着现代史上最严重的经济、政治和社会危机。食品或药品等基本产品短缺，恶性通货膨胀与经济衰退并存。这种情况在该地区造成了前所未有的难民和移民危机。各国政府和国际机构一直无法使用传统方法来一致利用可靠的信息。因此，要组织和部署任何形式的人道主义应对措施，就必须评估新的方法来衡量拉丁美洲各地委内瑞拉难民和移民的数量和位置。在本文中，我们提议使用 Facebook 的广告平台作为监测正在进行的危机的额外数据源。我们估计和验证了难民和移民的国家和次国家数量，并细分了他们的社会经济概况，以进一步了解这一现象的复杂性。尽管存在局限性，但我们相信，所提出的方法可以用于实时评估全球范围内的难民和移民危机。
