An international team led by researchers from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has developed a method to measure the integration or segregation of immigrants based on the messages they write on the social network Twitter. In the work, published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers developed a method to use Twitter data to analyse the degree of spatial segregation of immigrant communities. “The users’ communities of origin are determined by the language in which the tweets are posted, establishing an ‘idiomatic algebra’ to assign the most likely community to which a tweet belongs,” explains the study’s director, José Javier Ramasco, CSIC researcher at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, in Mallorca, Spain.