News or Social Media? Socioeconomic divide of mobile service consumption

Abstract

Reliable and timely information on socioeconomic status and divides is critical to social and economic research and policing. Novel data sources from mobile communication platforms have enabled new cost-effective approaches and models to investigate social dis- parity, but their lack of interpretability, accuracy or scale has limited their relevance to date. We investigate the divide in digital mobile service usage with a large dataset of 3.7 billion time-stamped and geo-referenced mobile traffic records in a major European country, and find profound geographical unevenness in mobile service usage – especially on news, e-mail, social media consumption, and audio/video streaming. We relate such diversity with income, educational attainment, and inequality, and reveal how low income or low education areas are more likely to engage in video streaming or social media, and less in news consumption, information searching, e-mail, or audio streaming. The digital usage gap is so large that we can accurately infer socioeconomic status of a small area or even its Gini coefficient only from aggregated data traffic. Our results make the case for a cheap, privacy-preserving, real-time, and scalable way to understand the digital usage divide and, in turn, poverty, unemployment, or economic growth in our societies through mobile phone data.