Cheap Tweets?: Crisis Signaling in the Age of Twitter

Abstract World leaders are increasingly turning to social media to engage in crisis signaling. This raises important questions about the effects of emerging communication technologies on international politics. In particular, are threats issued via social media seen as more or less credible than those issued through traditional channels such as government press releases? Using survey experiments fielded both on unique samples of foreign policy experts in the United States, India, and Singapore and on US public samples, we find that threat medium generally generates no significant difference in perceived credibility among national security experts and members of the public. Put differently, tweeted threats are not seen as “cheaper talk” than threats issued through more traditional channels. This project extends work on crisis signaling, elite decision-making, and the domestic politics of international relations by taking into account an increasingly common technology.