Over 180 world leaders maintain social media accounts, and some of them issue policy warnings to rivals and the public on these platforms rather than relying on traditional government statements. How seriously do people take such social media postings' A new study suggests the general public and policymakers alike take leaders' social media posts just as seriously as they take formal government statements. The research, by MIT political scientists, deploys novel surveys of both the public and experienced foreign policy specialists. 'What we find, which is really surprising, across both expert audiences and public audiences, is that tweets are not necessarily seen as this form of cheap talk,' says Erik Lin-Greenberg, an MIT faculty member and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. 'They're viewed as the same type of signal as that being offered through more formal and traditional communications.' The findings suggest that people have become so fully acclimatized to social...
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