Re-tweeting the Ayatollah

摘要

"Have you ever received the message of Islam from any sources other than the media?" tweeted Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini in a recent letter to the youth of Europe and North America over the hashtag #Letter4U on January 22, 2015 (Khameini, 2015). On the very same day, the Prime Minister of Yemen announced his resignation and that of his cabinet on his Facebook page, explaining the act by saying "so that we are not made party to what is going on and what will happen" (Almosawa and Nordland, 2015). While the replication of official communications in social media has been taking place for a number of years, we believe that these two pronouncements in early 2015 represent a new level of social media engagement by government entities that needs to be examined more closely. In the case of the Ayatollah, the tweets in question were apparently re-posts from his Web site and not from any other official communique.