What Facebook friendship data says about friendship between countries

Does your country have a best friend country? For most, it is a neighbour you would expect and one or two you would not. The two strongest friendships on the planet are between tiny island neighbours: Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Tonga and Samoa, whose populations are so intertwined that almost everyone seems to know someone across the water.

The score behind this map is Facebook's Social Connectedness Index, which measures the number of friendships between two countries and creates a score adjusted for how many users each country has. A higher score means the two populations are more woven together.

The surprise is that even bitter rivals stay close. Russia and Ukraine are more connected than 97 percent of all country pairs, and Ethiopia and Eritrea, who fought a brutal war, are each other's single strongest tie.

How tied to each other are countries based on Facebook friendship data?

Cross-border Facebook friendship ties between countries

Focus countries

Region

Ties shown Make one country centre of focus

Africa

Americas

Asia

Europe

Oceania

How to interact: Choose countries in Filters. Pinch to zoom, use two fingers to move the map, or use the zoom buttons. Hover a dot or line for its value.

The world's strongest Facebook friendship ties

Top 10 country pairs by connectedness score

How to interact: This chart follows the map above. Pick countries there to see their strongest ties here, or set a centre of focus to list that country’s closest friends instead.

Most connected countries on Facebook by average tie strength, by region

Data note: Scores average each country's cross-border Facebook friendship ties. Regions follow UN geographic groupings.

Explore more of this data here

Zoom out and the pattern is mostly about geography and history. The heaviest lines cluster inside regions and along old migration routes: Kenya with Somalia and Uganda, South Africa with Lesotho, Serbia with Montenegro, Greece with Cyprus, France with Comoros, and Russia with Armenia. Shared borders, a common language and a colonial past pull populations together long after the politics has moved on. Friendship, as Facebook measures it, tends to follow the paths people have actually walked, married across, and moved along.

The size of a country barely predicts how connected it is. Some of the densest ties belong to the smallest places, where a single wave of migration can link almost everyone to relatives abroad, while giant neighbours can stay surprisingly distant. Read the map as a picture of human ties rather than politics or trade, and remember what it cannot see: Facebook is absent or blocked in several countries, so China, Iran and the two Koreas do not appear, and rich diaspora nations can look more connected simply because more of their people are online.

Data: Facebook Social Connectedness Index via the Humanitarian Data Exchange, accessed July 2026. It measures relative Facebook friendship probability, not political relations. Node size uses 2024 population estimates. Facebook restrictions and uneven use can understate some countries.

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