Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate corporate financial disclosure via Twitter among the top listed 350 companies in the UK as well as identify the determinants of the extent of social media usage to disclose financial information. Design/methodology/approach This study applies an unsupervised machine learning technique, namely, Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling to identify financial disclosure tweets. Panel, Logistic and Generalized Linear Model Regressions are also run to identify the determinants of financial disclosure on Twitter focusing mainly on board characteristics. Findings Topic modeling results reveal that companies mainly tweet about 12 topics, including financial disclosure, which has a probability of occurrence of about 7 percent. Several board characteristics are found to be associated with the extent of Twitter usage as a financial disclosure platform, among which are board independence, gender diversity and board tenure. Originality/value The extensive literature examines disclosure via traditional media and its determinants, yet this paper extends the literature by investigating the relatively new disclosure channel of social media. This study is among the first to utilize machine learning, instead of manual coding techniques, to automatically unveil the tweets’ topics and reveal financial disclosure tweets. It is also among the first to investigate the relationships between several board characteristics and financial disclosure on Twitter; providing a distinction between the roles of executive vs non-executive directors relating to disclosure decisions.
This study aims at exploring and investigating whether disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on Twitter signals true CSR performance or merely is a greenwashing tool to conceal and compensate for inferior CSR performance. Based on a sample of 167,908 tweets posted by the constituents of the FTSE 350 Index, topic modelling—a natural language processing technique based on unsupervised learning—is utilized to identify CSR disclosure on social media. Our empirical evidence based on several regression models shows association between firms' CSR performance and disclosure, which supports the signalling story, and hence, casts doubt on the greenwashing behaviour among UK firms on social media. Our findings suggest several implications for researchers, shareholders, and practitioners as the relation between CSR disclosure on influential, widely reached platforms such as social media and CSR performance carries important indications about the credibility of the content of such disclosure, the extent to which it reflects actual CSR performance, and hence its usefulness for all stakeholders interested in CSR. The true motive behind CSR disclosures can greatly influence how stakeholders perceive such information and the extent to which they can rely on it for decision making purposes.
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