UN Global Pulse is an international initiative. It was established to provide up-to-date data and analysis promoting awareness of the opportunities that Big Data presents and provide policymakers with the responsive, precise information they need to plan and react to a wide variety of situations.

The Post-2015 project used data from Twitter to map the social, economic and cultural priorities of the nations of the world. The visualisation presents the Top 20 countries that tweeted about particular issues since August 2012, providing league tables based on percentages showing the volume of tweets that were posted in that country about a certain topic.

Some of the conclusions we can draw from this information demonstrate the capacity for the internet to give a platform to the oppressed – for example, the nations most concerned with equality of the sexes were largely third world countries with restrictive social doctrines and laws.

Conversely, the representation of our own country was somewhat predictable – the United Kingdom only charted in the top 20 when discussing welfare or employment.

Social media is such an everyday tool for so many millions of people – the data produced can provide incredibly specific evidence for governments to work with. This global scope of this visualisation demonstrates the potential for governmental organisations, such as the UN, to use Big Data for creating and refining intelligent policy.