The Audience Structure of Shame: Twitter, the UPR, and the Logic of Diplomatic Condemnation

Naming and shaming is increasingly understood as a three-way relationship among a shamer, a target, and an audience, yet the audience itself is rarely varied. This paper holds the speaker constant and varies the audience, comparing the 33,484 recommendations issued by 102 states during the third cycle of the UN Universal Periodic Review (2017–2022) with 50,328 country-directed tweets posted by 125 UN mission accounts, drawn from the same set of missions, over the same period. Every communication is placed on a common five-point severity scale, running from non-evaluative statements through graded reform demands to direct condemnation and moral blame. Both hypotheses that shaming is more severe and more frequent on twitter are supported. Condemnation constitutes 6.7 percent of platform output, compared with 0.3 percent of institutional output. Among communications that evaluate another state at all, it is more than a hundred times more prevalent on Twitter. With each mission held against its own institutional conduct through fixed effects, moving from the review to the timeline raises the probability that a given communication is a condemnation by 6.3 percentage points. The audience plays a role in structuring diplomatic condemnation.