Which parts of India are friends with each other?

Data: Meta, Social Connectedness Index, on the Humanitarian Data Exchange (public domain). Friendships among Facebook users with more than 20 friends who were active in the 30 days before 25 January 2026, released 29 January 2026. Method: Johnston, Kuchler, Kulkarni and Stroebel, The Social Connectedness Index (2026), and Bailey, Cao, Kuchler, Stroebel and Wong (2018).

The index is the number of friendship links between two places divided by the product of their Facebook users, so it is the relative probability that two users, one in each place, are friends. Meta adds statistical noise for privacy and leaves out places with fewer than 500 users. Each place’s values are shown against its own tenth percentile, as in the researchers’ maps, so the scale differs from one selection to the next.

Places are GADM 4.1 boundaries, which Meta uses and which predate some changes. At state level, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh are one unit. Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, separate in the source, are combined here, weighted by their Census 2011 populations. Districts are GADM’s 665, so districts created since (for example in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) appear within their parent districts; a few renamed districts carry today’s names. Jammu and Kashmir’s 20 districts and Ladakh’s two are all included. The parts of India’s map administered by Pakistan and China (Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Aksai Chin) are counted under those countries in Meta’s data, so they are drawn in plain grey.

Coverage: DataReportal, Digital 2026 India. Meta publishes no Facebook user counts by state, so how well each state is covered is not known. Instagram and WhatsApp are not included; Meta publishes no such data for them. Countries where Facebook is blocked, such as China and Iran, are not in the data. Meta advises against comparing its releases over time.