From “Bangtan Boys” to “International Relations Professor”

Mapping Self‐Identifications in the UN’s Twitter Public

Bibliographic Data

ID13054199
AuthorsLuis Aue (0000-0002-3445-2043, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, corresponding author), Florian Börgel (0000-0003-3294-667X, Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde)
Year2023
Volume11
Issue3
Pages120-133
Publication date2023-07-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitics and Governance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2183-2463 • E-ISSN: 2183-2463
PublisherCogitatio (PUBLISHER • PT)
DOI10.17645/pag.v11i3.6769
OpenAlexW4383820996
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited36

Digitalization and social media established world-encompassing publics that engage with international organizations. While scholarship has analyzed how international organizations communicate with such digital publics, this article determines who participates in these publics. We created a novel dataset to map the UN’s digital public on Twitter and analyzed the bios of 243,168 accounts that have interacted with the UN. Members of this public provide self-identifications (such as researcher, consultant, or scientist) that indicate a professional interest in the UN. We analyzed clusters of users that self-identify with similar words. We find high heterogeneity in the UN’s digital public: Clusters of professional, academic, and organizational users suggest that the technocratic history of international organizations reflects in the members of its digital public. At the same time, the digital public of the UN extends to very different groups (human rights activists and K-Pop fans feature in the UN’s public on Twitter). We demonstrate for future research how multiple correspondence analysis can reveal clusters in unstructured biographical data. The article contributes the first analysis of self-identifications in digital publics of global politics

Centrality · Digital scholarship · Library science · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Publics · Scholarship · Social media · Sociology · Technocracy · Law · Media Studies and Communication · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies · Social Media and Politics

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Open DOIOpen Access