Social media insights for sustainable development and humanitarian action in Indonesia

Tracking human development and humanitarian action has been enhanced by the growth of social media. Twitter is a data source with potential, when used alongside data from surveys, especially the national census, to understand the situation on the ground and track changes. In Indonesia, a country with one of the highest Twitter penetration rates, we seize this opportunity by using Twitter data to produce more timely insights and to enhance evidence-based decision-making. Despite social media's limitations, namely representativeness and validity, we are able to show its potential by looking at case studies on five different topics; (a) food and agriculture, (b) public health (c) economic well-being (d) urban resilience and (e) humanitarian action. We observe that the insights gained by using Twitter data were derived not only from the content of posts such as understanding public opinion or sentiment, but also from activities related to it, for instance the location and time-stamp of the post, which furthers our real-time understanding of the situation and user behavior changes. In this paper, we also briefly explain "social listener", a social media monitoring tool that used by Government of Indonesia to understand citizen opinions in social media related to government priorities.