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21 Chinese J. Int'l L. 1 (2022)

handle is hein.journals/chnint21 and id is 1 raw text is: © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/10.1093/chinesejil/jmac007; Advance Access publication 14 March 2022 The Rise of Twiplomacy and the Making of Customary International Law on Social Media James A. Green* Abstract Social media usage by States has increased exponentially in recent years. This phenomenon, known as twiplomacy, has become ubiq- uitous. Given that almost every State in the world now issues state- ments via social media, this article examines the potential for Twitter posts to form part of the raw material for the formation of custom- ary international law. In other words, it considers whether customary international law can be made, or evidence of it identified, on social media. Public statements can, in the right contexts, act as State prac- tice or as evidence of opinio juris, and a Twitter post from a State * Professor of Public International Law, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK, james14.green@uwe.ac.uk. This article would not have been possible were it not for the work undertaken by my research assistant, Konstantina Nouka. I gratefully acknowledge her contribution, in particular in conducting the empirical work to develop the dataset that underpins Part VI. Konstantina also provided an important background paper. I acknowledge that Konstantina's work was funded by my previous institution, the University of Reading, under its UROP scheme. Three earlier versions of this project were presented in different settings: at the University of Reading in July 2020, as a keynote presentation for the International Law section of the Society of Legal Scholars at the annual conference in Durham in September 2021, and at UWE in October 2021. I would like to thank all who attended these presentations, and particularly those who provided feedback as a re- sult. Finally, I would like to express my deepest thanks to the colleagues who kindly read and gave insightful comments on earlier written versions of this paper: Professor Michael Byers, Professor Nodle Quenivet, Dr Martins Paparinskis and Tsvetelina van Benthem, as well as the two anonymous peer-reviewers. All websites accessed 23 February 2022. 21 Chinese Journal ofInternationalLaw (2022), 1-53