@WHO says what on the pandemic? COVID, Twitter, and the Crowd

In the last ten years, international organizations (IOs) have not only ‘gone public’ but also ‘digital’. With the potential to disseminate policy-related information at low cost in an instance, social media recently became a new asset in raising public awareness for pressing problems such as the trajectories of a global pandemic. Looking at the WHO’s use of Twitter during key moments of the CoViD-19 pandemic, the paper considers ways the WHO articulates and frames the crisis and the degree to which such communication practices are effective in generating public resonance. More specifically, it takes on the technological affordances of Twitter for crowdsourced distribution and framing by researching to what extent WHO content has been retweeted, quoted and tagged with evaluative “reactions” by other users. How effective has the WHO been in reaching out to external audiences? To what extent have specific strategies – such as visualization, personalization and emotionalization – led such resonance to vary in terms of form and tone? To provide answers, the paper starts with mapping out different twitter handles that speak on behalf of the WHO and reconstructs their strategies to communicate relevant information. The paper then uses multivariate regression to estimate the effectiveness of these strategies.