Analysis of the digital divide through Facebook data: a Finite Mixture approach

The Facebook Marketing Application Programming Interface (API) is a tool that provides the approximate number of Facebook users who match specific characteristics. Our aim is to analyse the digital divide through the Facebook API data via a finite mixture approach for interval-censored count data. In this framework, response variables represent the upper and lower bounds of the number of users expressing interest in a certain digital topic. The proposed model allows us to identify cluster of users’ profiles sharing interests towards subsets of digital topics. In detail, we obtain homogeneous groups of Facebook users and digital topics, and we show how digitalization groups differ by age, gender, and education.