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Social networks had added more fuel to the fire of the Greek crisis, the result of this being its further deepening. This is the conclusion of a study published in the Wall Street Journal.

According to the study, social media can play a positive role when it comes to happy events and news but when a country has economic problems, like Greece in recent years, their intervention is all but positive.

Three economists, namely Theologos Dergiadis, Kostas Milas and Theodoros Panagiotidis from the University of Western Macedonia, the University of Liverpool and the Greek International University studied how tweets, Facebook posts, blogs and Google searches had influenced the bond markets in the euro area in the hardest days of the debt crisis.

Their conclusion is that the information disseminated through tweets, posts and internet searches had increased the borrowing costs not only of Greece but also of other countries that had found themselves in a crisis.

"We show that social media and Google searches related to the Greek crisis provide important information that explains the spreads between the bonds of the European periphery and those of Germany, beyond the information provided by other financial variables," state the authors of the study.

The economists established that this phenomenon was more pronounced in the case of Greece and Ireland, where Twitter was the main tool that had influenced bond yields.

The study reveals the old and familiar dilemma of those engaged in politics, namely, in order to overcome a crisis, which is better, to speak, or to avoid saying anything, about it in today's interconnected world.

The scientists, however, are firm that the more politicians spoke of the Greek crisis, the references to it on social media increased and, along with them, the spreads of Greek bonds.