Edinburgh Napier University

  Purpose – In this exploratory study, we examine whether Twitter messaging can help mitigate the harm corporations suffer in the aftermath of ethical scandals.
Design/methodology/approach – We apply web Application Programming Interfaces (API) on the Guardian and New York Times news archives to find corporations that suffered scandals between 2014 and 2019, revealing 92 publicly listed companies in the United Kingdom. Using Twitter API and the Python library, Getoldtweets, we extract historical, pre-scandal – i.e. pre-2014 – tweets of the 92 firms. We topic-model the tweets data using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We then subject the topics to Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to examine commonalities among them.
Findings – LDA reveals 10 topics which group under five themes; these are Product Marketing, Urgent Signalling of ‘Greenness’, Customer Relationship Management, Corporate Strategy, and News Feeds. MDS suggests that the topics further congregate into two meta-themes of Future-oriented versus Immediate, and Individual versus Global.
Implications – Provided they are sincere and legitimate, corporations’ tweets on global issues with a green agenda should help cushion the impact of ethical scandals. Overall, however, our findings suggest that Twitter messaging could be a double-edged sword, and underscore the importance of strategy.
Originality/value – The paper offers a first exploration of the relevance of corporate Twitter messaging in mitigating ethical scandals.