Networks as Sensors: Passive Measurement as a Lens on Society, A case study on two European elections#

Orlando Eduardo Martínez-Durive, IMDEA Networks Institute & Net AI

• Why: Not a networking-ops talk, but a genuinely surprising result about what the passive measurements operators already run for engineering can reveal: per-antenna app demand from a major French mobile operator (market share ~31%, ~22M subscribers) predicts political alignment — and the study is an open invitation to operators to build this instrumentation together.
• What: Using aggregated, GDPR-compliant mobile metadata (per-antenna demand for 22–27 apps, residential evening window) across the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament elections, digital consumption carries an independent signal about vote share that for several parties matches or exceeds traditional socioeconomic indicators; combining both increases explanatory power by up to 28.23%, consistently across both elections. The illustrative case: two demographically near-identical towns 10 km apart with far-right vote shares of 31% vs 20% differ mainly in app-consumption profiles (Facebook +5% vs −26%; online news −21% vs +43%).
• How: Revealed Comparative Advantage normalization to make per-app volumes comparable across antennas, alignment of antenna-level demand with commune-level socioeconomic and vote data, and regression modeling of vote shares.
• Where applicable: Research collaboration with MNO/ISP/IXP vantage points; the broader argument is that operator passive measurement could become a platform-independent instrument for observing society — with all the privacy and governance questions that implies.