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

Mobile operators, ISPs, and IXPs run passive measurements for engineering, which can also be used as complementary vantage points on how society behaves online: mobility, application consumption, disruptions, and how all of these vary across space and time. The community already reads major events off this infrastructure, i.e., shutdowns, cable cuts, and wartime rerouting, through RIPE RIS and Atlas, IODA, and OONI. We argue that the same passive vantage reaches subtler social signals, such as political alignment during elections.

We analyze passive mobile metadata from a major French operator across urban and suburban France during the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament elections. We align per-antenna demand for tens of mobile services with socioeconomic indicators at the commune (municipality) level, and model vote shares. We find that digital consumption carries an independent signal about political alignment that, for several parties, matches or exceeds traditional socioeconomic indicators; combining both increases explanatory ability by up to 28.23%. The associations are consistent across both elections.

The broader point is that each MNO, ISP, and IXP vantage point trades spatial resolution for reach and diversity, and together they could form a platform-independent instrument for observing the digital society, one that does not depend on APIs that platforms can withdraw. This talk is also an invitation: I am looking to open collaborations with researchers and with MNO, ISP, and IXP operators to map what each vantage point can measure and to build this instrument together.