Communication departments of international organizations (IOs) are important intermediaries of global governance who increasingly use social media to reach out to citizens directly. Social media pose new challenges for IO communication such as a highly competitive economy of attention and the fragmentation of the audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure. In this context, communication departments have to make tough choices about what to communicate and how, aggravating inherent tensions between IO communication as comprehensive public information (aimed at institutional transparency)—and partisan political advocacy (aimed at normative change). If IO communication focuses on advocacy it might garner substantial resonance on social media. Such advocacy nevertheless fails to the extent that it fosters the polarized fragmentation of networked communication and undermines the credibility of IO communication as a source of trustworthy information across polarized “echo chambers.” The paper illustrates this argument through a content and social network analysis of Twitter communication on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM). Remarkably, instead of facilitating cross-cluster communication (“building bridges”) Twitter handles run by the United Nations Department of Global Communications (UNDGC) seem to have substantially fostered ideological fragmentation (“digging the trench”) by their way of partisan retweeting, mentioning, and (hash)tagging.

国际组织（IO）的传播部门是全球治理的重要中介机构，他们越来越多地使用社交媒体直接接触公民。社交媒体给 IO 传播带来了新的挑战，例如高度竞争的注意力经济以及由网络内容管理和选择性曝光驱动的受众碎片化。在这种背景下，传播部门必须就传播内容和传播方式做出艰难的选择，从而加剧了信息作战传播作为综合公共信息（旨在实现机构透明度）与党派政治倡导（旨在规范变革）之间的固有紧张关系。如果IO传播侧重于宣传，它可能会在社交媒体上引起广泛共鸣。然而，这种宣传在某种程度上是失败的，因为它助长了网络通信的两极分化，并破坏了信息作战通信作为跨两极分化“回音室”的可信信息来源的可信度。本文通过对《安全、有序和正常移民全球契约》(GCM) 的 Twitter 传播进行内容和社交网络分析，阐述了这一论点。值得注意的是，联合国全球传播部 (UNDGC) 运营的 Twitter 账号非但没有促进跨群体沟通（“搭建桥梁”），反而通过党派转发的方式极大地促进了意识形态分裂（“挖掘战壕”），提及和（散列）标记。