Using Twitter to Understand the Post-2015 Global Development Priorities

Global Pulse and the UN Millennium Campaign developed a social media monitor of priority topics related to the Post-2015 development agenda. The monitor aims to provide real-time information on the development issues that most concern people around the world. By filtering Twitter every day for comments relevant to sixteen key development topics, the monitor shows which topics are most talked about in different countries over time. The monitor filters tweets using a taxonomy of approximately 25,000 words in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, yielding around 10 million relevant new tweets each month. Global Pulse developed an interactive online dashboard that automatically updates monthly to visualize country-level topics of conversation. By 2015, the dashboard had been used by over 15,000 people, including support to several policy initiatives during the Post-2015 agenda setting process.