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

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.