Adapting Institutional Purpose to Avoid Delegitimation? IOs' Social Media Communication in Times of Anti-Cosmopolitan Contestation

IO communication professionals are key intermediaries of global governance, regularly using social media to reach out directly to citizens - mostly to flag problems, call for action, and claim credit for their own achievements in addressing these problems. Social media pose a number of structural challenges for IO public communication, such as the lack of privileged coverage of institutional voices that traditional news organizations are known for, as well as the notable fragmentation of audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure. Most importantly, social media provides a hotbed of fundamental opposition to "liberal" IOs from the far right, for whom IOs have become important symbols of "globalism" and a "liberal international order" that supposedly promotes "wokeness" on a planetary scale. How IO communication responds to such contestation has recently received some scholarly attention. What is missing, however, is a systematic examination of whether and how the main narrative of IO communication has changed to accommodate fundamental critique and restore social legitimacy. More specifically, has communication changed by reframing institutional purpose in terms of both values and constituencies? To what extent does such strategic adaptation successfully stimulate public engagement with its messages or, on the contrary, even undermine their resonance? The paper explores these questions through a quantitative content analysis of tweets sent from the main institutional handles of sixteen major IOs between 2008 and 2023.