Tweeting through the pandemic: self-legitimation and depoliticization in the WHO Twittersphere

Matthias Hofferberth

Chapter 17 in Handbook on Governance in International Organizations, 2023, pp 269-288 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: For many years now, intergovernmental organizations (IOs) have not only ‘gone public’ but also ‘digital’. With the potential to disseminate information globally at a low cost in an instance, social media both creates opportunities as well as challenges and risks for IOs. Looking at the WHO use of Twitter during COVID-19, the chapter reconstructs how an organization in crisis engages its audience(s) in social media and discusses how this contributes to the IO’s legitimacy. Under heavy attack from the USA for its lack of a strong, decisive response to COVID, the framing of the crisis and the sentiment in which it is communicated on Twitter reveals how the WHO dealt with criticism and whether the organization intended to depoliticize the crisis through its tweets. To explore and assess how the WHO utilized Twitter and how this might affect the organization’s legitimacy, the chapter first connects research on IO legitimation in global governance with work on social media. Second, it maps out the WHO Twittersphere and its institutional and individual accounts that speak on behalf of the organization. Third, the chapter provides a content analysis on the framing, purpose, and sentiment of tweets as well as the WHO’s organizational self-image projected through Twitter throughout the pandemic. Based on the analysis, the chapter assesses whether and how the WHO used Twitter for self-legitimation and concludes that the organizational strategy overall mostly reflects an attempt to depoliticization as the organization frames itself as a neutral provider of health information and not a moral authority vis-à-vis its member states.

Keywords: Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800884939.00031 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:20648_17

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().