Engaging the enemy? IO social media communication, far-right contestation, and public resonance

IO communication professionals are important intermediaries of global governance that increasingly use social media to reach out to citizens directly. Social media pose a number of structural challenges for IO public communication—including the lack of privileged reporting of institutional voices for which classical news organizations are known as well as the notable fragmentation of audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure. As a result, social media provide a hotbed of fundamental opposition to “liberal” IOs from the far right, for which IOs have become major symbols of “globalism” and “liberal international order.” How IO communication responds to such contestation has not received much attention from IO studies. To what extent does IO communication change in the face of far-right contestation? For example, does it seek to accommodate far-right critique by reframing policies and procedures? To what extent does such strategic adaption successfully spur public engagement with its messages or, to the contrary, even undermine its resonance? The paper investigates these questions through qualitative content and social network analysis of Twitter communication about the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM). The process that finally led to the GCM spurred public controversies and protests, which have been heavily orchestrated by the far right in and beyond Europe. Universalist claims are at the core of the GCM: its approach focuses on “orderly and regular” migration as being to the benefit of all, i.e., migrants as well as home, transit, and host societies. At the same time, it frames migrants as a vulnerable group that deserves special protection given multiple threats such as trafficking, exploitation, and xenophobia. Such claims have been most fiercely contested by the far right who denounce the GCM as a self-serving project of (liberal) elites. It has been accused of encouraging mass migration from all the “inferior” parts of the world as well as neglecting inherent distributional conflicts on territory, wealth, and culture to the detriment of national communities. Despite the GCM not being legally binding, it has been widely described by the far right as an attempt to weaken sovereign control over national borders, which—from their perspective—are essential to protect their societies from the many dangers of irregular mass migration. Thus, the GCM debate provides a prime case for how IOs have become linchpins of contestation of the “liberal international order” in the recent past and how IO communication has been working in such a context. Various UN agencies have been tweeting about the GCM, making it an instructive case for understanding how IO communication adapted to contestation from the far right over time and how successfully it did so in terms of public engagement. The paper investigates UN tweets and public engagement in terms of retweeting, likes, and replies to these tweets by other users on Twitter/X. Exponential family random graph models (ERGM) are applied to link UN communication strategies to other users’ engagement.