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Abstract This study leverages mobile data for 5.4 million users to unveil the complex dynamics of daily mobility and longer-term relocations in and from Santiago, Chile, during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on socioeconomic differentials. We estimated a relative increase in daily mobility, in 2020, for lower-income compared to higher-income regions. In contrast, longer-term relocation rose primarily among higher-income groups. These shifts indicate nuanced responses to the pandemic across socioeconomic classes. Compared to 2017, economic factors in 2020 had a stronger influence on the decision to relocate and the selection of destinations, suggesting transformations in mobility behaviors. Contrary to previously held beliefs, there was no evidence supporting a preference for rural over urban destinations, despite the surge in emigration from Santiago during the pandemic. This study enhances our understanding of how varying socioeconomic conditions interact with mobility decisions during crises and provides insights for policymakers aiming to enact fair and evidence-based measures in rapidly changing circumstances.

Abstract Despite increased global attention on violence against women, understanding the factors that lead to women becoming victims remains a critical challenge. Notably, the impact of domestic violence on women’s mobility—a critical determinant of their social and economic independence—has remained largely unexplored. This study bridges this gap, employing police records to quantify physical and psychological domestic violence, while leveraging mobile phone data to proxy women’s mobility. Our analyses reveal a negative correlation between physical violence and female mobility, an association that withstands robustness checks, including controls for economic independence variables like education, employment, and occupational segregation, bootstrapping of the data set, and applying a generalized propensity score matching identification strategy. The study emphasizes the potential causal role of physical violence on decreased female mobility, asserting the value of interdisciplinary research in exploring such multifaceted social phenomena to open avenues for preventive measures. The implications of this research extend into the realm of public policy and intervention development, offering new strategies to combat and ultimately eradicate domestic violence against women, thereby contributing to wider efforts toward gender equity.

Measurement(s) human mobility inter- and intra-administrative country areas Technology Type(s) mobile phone records Sample Characteristic - Organism Homo sapiens Sample Characteristic - Environment city Sample Characteristic - Location Chile

Abstract Inferring mobile phone users’ home location, i.e., assigning a location in space to a user based on data generated by the mobile phone network, is a central task in leveraging mobile phone data to study social and urban phenomena. Despite its widespread use, home detection relies on assumptions that are difficult to check without ground truth, i.e., where the individual who owns the device resides. In this paper, we present a dataset that comprises the mobile phone activity of sixty-five participants for whom the geographical coordinates of their residence location are known. The mobile phone activity refers to Call Detail Records (CDRs), eXtended Detail Records (XDRs), and Control Plane Records (CPRs), which vary in their temporal granularity and differ in the data generation mechanism. We provide an unprecedented evaluation of the accuracy of home detection algorithms and quantify the amount of data needed for each stream to carry out successful home detection for each stream. Our work is useful for researchers and practitioners to minimize data requests and maximize the accuracy of the home antenna location.

Fine-grained studies of epidemic spread and of the effect of nonpharmaceutical interventions are still needed to underpin demographic and socio-economic effects. Here, the authors study the spatial and temporal spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Santiago de Chile using anonymized mobile phone data.

Abstract Mobile phone data have been extensively used to study urban mobility. However, studies based on gender-disaggregated large-scale data are still lacking, limiting our understanding of gendered aspects of urban mobility and our ability to design policies for gender equality. Here we study urban mobility from a gendered perspective, combining commercial and open datasets for the city of Santiago, Chile. We analyze call detail records for a large cohort of anonymized mobile phone users and reveal a gender gap in mobility: women visit fewer unique locations than men, and distribute their time less equally among such locations. Mapping this mobility gap over administrative divisions, we observe that a wider gap is associated with lower income and lack of public and private transportation options. Our results uncover a complex interplay between gendered mobility patterns, socio-economic factors and urban affordances, calling for further research and providing insights for policymakers and urban planners.

Abstract The always increasing mobile connectivity affects every aspect of our daily lives, including how and when we keep ourselves informed and consult news media. By studying a DPI (deep packet inspection) dataset, provided by one of the major Chilean telecommunication companies, we investigate how different cohorts of the population of Santiago De Chile consume news media content through their smartphones. We find that some socio-demographic attributes are highly associated to specific news media consumption patterns. In particular, education and age play a significant role in shaping the consumers behaviour even in the digital context, in agreement with a large body of literature on off-line media distribution channels.

Abstract The power of the press to shape the informational landscape of a population is unparalleled, even now in the era of democratic access to all information outlets. However, it is known that news outlets (particularly more traditional ones) tend to discriminate who they want to reach, and who to leave aside. In this work, we attempt to shed some light on the audience targeting patterns of newspapers, using the Chilean media ecosystem. First, we use the gravity model to analyze geography as a factor in explaining audience reachability. This shows that some newspapers are indeed driven by geographical factors (mostly local news outlets) but some others are not (national-distribution outlets). For those which are not, we use a regression model to study the influence of socioeconomic and political characteristics in news outlets adoption. We conclude that indeed larger, national-distribution news outlets target populations based on these factors, rather than on geography or immediacy.

Abstract In Latin America, shopping malls seem to offer an open, safe and democratic version of the public space. However, it is often difficult to quantitatively measure whether they indeed foster, hinder, or are neutral with respect to social inclusion. In this work, we investigate if, and by how much, people from different social classes are attracted by the same malls. Using a dataset of mobile phone network records from 387,152 devices identified as customers of 16 malls in Santiago de Chile, we performed several analyses to study whether malls with higher social mixing attract more people. Our pipeline, which starts with the socio-economic characterization of mall visitors, includes the estimation of social mixing and diversity of malls, the application of the gravity model of mobility, and the definition of a co-visitation model. Results showed that people tend to choose a profile of malls more in line with their own socio-economic status and the distance from their home to the mall, and that higher mixing does positively contribute to the process of choosing a mall. We conclude that (a) there is social mixing in malls, and (b) that social mixing is a factor at the time of choosing which mall to go to. Thus, the potential for social mixing in malls could be capitalized by designing public policies regarding transportation and mobility to make some malls strong social inclusion hubs.

Abstract Pokémon Go, a location-based game that uses augmented reality techniques, received unprecedented media coverage due to claims that it allowed for greater access to public spaces, increasing the number of people out on the streets, and generally improving health, social, and security indices. However, the true impact of Pokémon Go on people’s mobility patterns in a city is still largely unknown. In this paper, we perform a natural experiment using data from mobile phone networks to evaluate the effect of Pokémon Go on the pulse of a big city: Santiago, capital of Chile. We found significant effects of the game on the floating population of Santiago compared to movement prior to the game’s release in August 2016: in the following week, up to 13.8% more people spent time outside at certain times of the day, even if they do not seem to go out of their usual way. These effects were found by performing regressions using count models over the states of the cellphone network during each day under study. The models used controlled for land use, daily patterns, and points of interest in the city. Our results indicate that, on business days, there are more people on the street at commuting times, meaning that people did not change their daily routines but slightly adapted them to play the game. Conversely, on Saturday and Sunday night, people indeed went out to play, but favored places close to where they live. Even if the statistical effects of the game do not reflect the massive change in mobility behavior portrayed by the media, at least in terms of expanse, they do show how ‘the street’ may become a new place of leisure. This change should have an impact on long-term infrastructure investment by city officials, and on the drafting of public policies aimed at stimulating pedestrian traffic.

News consumers expect news outlets to be objective and balanced in their reports of events and opinions. However, there is a growing body of evidence of bias in the media caused by underlying political and socio-economic viewpoints. Previous studies have tried to classify the partiality of the media, but there is little work on quantifying it, and less still on the nature of this partiality. The vast amount of content published in social media enables us to quantify the inclination of the press to pre-defined sides of the socio-political spectrum. To describe such tendencies, we use tweets to automatically compute a news outlet's political and socio-economic orientation. Results show that the media have a measurable bias, and illustrate this by showing the favoritism of Chilean media for the ruling political parties in the country. This favoritism becomes clearer as we empirically observe a shift in the position of the mass media when there is a change in government. Even though relative differences in bias between news outlets can be observed, public awareness of the bias of the media landscape as a whole appears to be limited by the political space defined by the news that we receive as a population. We found that the nature of the bias is reflected in the vocabulary used and the entities mentioned by different news outlets. A survey conducted among news consumers confirms that media bias has an impact on the coverage of controversial topics and that this is perceivable by the general audience. Having a more accurate method to measure and characterize media bias will help readers position outlets in the socio-economic landscape, even when a (sometimes opposite) self-declared position is stated. This will empower readers to better reflect on the content provided by their news outlets of choice.

Even democracies endowed with the most active free press struggle to maintain diversity of news coverage. Consolidation and market forces may cause only a few dominant players to control the news cycle. Editorial policies may be biased by corporate ownership relations, narrowing news coverage and focus. To an increasing degree this problem also applies to social media news distribution, since it is subject to the same socio-economic drivers. To study the effects of consolidation and ownership on news diversity, we model the diversity of Chilean coverage on the basis of ownership records and social media data. We create similarity networks of news outlets on the basis of their ownership and the topics they cover. We then examine the relationships between the topology of ownership networks and content similarity to characterize how ownership affects news coverage. A network analysis reveals that Chilean media is highly concentrated both in terms of ownership as well as in terms of topics covered. Our method can be used to determine which groups of outlets and ownership exert the greatest influence on news coverage.