The Role of Social Media in Promoting Information Disclosure on Environmental Incidents: An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective

Abstract

In recent years, social media has had a crucial role in promoting governments to act more responsibly. However, few studies have investigated whether social media use actually leads to increased disclosure during environmental incidents, or how social media influences regional governments’ information disclosure, even though delayed and insufficient disclosure on relevant incidents is often widespread in China. In this article, we model information disclosure during environmental incidents as an evolutionary game process between the central government and local governments, and examine the role of social media on game participants’ strategy selections in the information disclosure game. The results indicate that social media plays an active role in promoting the regional government to proactively disclose information during environmental incidents through two mechanisms: the top–down intervention mechanism, and the bottom–up reputation mechanism. More specifically, social media can provide efficient information channels for the central government to supervise local officials’ limited disclosure during environmental incidents, essentially sharing the central government’s supervision costs, and thus improving its supervision and intervention efficiency. Social media helps focus the public’s attention on the limited disclosure of local officials in environmental incidents, and actively mobilizes citizens to protest to maintain their interests, placing considerable pressure on the reputation of local governments.

Does Internal Control Contribute to a Firm’s Green Information Disclosure? Evidence from China

“…Social media plays an active role in environmental incidents through the top-down intervention mechanism, and the bottom-up reputation mechanism [44]. García-Ayuso and Larrinaga [20] pointed out that in Spain, two factors directly related to the amount of environmental information disclosure were the potential environmental impact of the industry and the degree of media coverage of companies in the industry.…”

The Influence of Top Managers on Environmental Information Disclosure: The Moderating Effect of Company’s Environmental Performance

“…The extant research in this domain follows two branches. Following an out-in approach [5], scholars have studied the impact of external factors, such as institutional pressure, media supervision, stakeholders, peer competition and customers, on companies’ EID [1,6,7,8,9,10,11,12].…”

Dynamic Evolution of Safety Regulation of the Ridesharing Industry under Social Media Participation

“…The study results indicated that active involvement from social media had a positive impact on regulatory effectiveness [33,34]. Therefore, some scholars have suggested that social media could function as a supplemental regulatory force in the safety regulation of food or environment [35]. These studies provide new insights for solving the ridesharing industry's problem of safety regulation.…”

“…Social media has proven to be an indirect way to solve safety regulatory problems via reporting safety risks or cases [35,56]. When it actively participates in regulation, it could be regarded as an efficient channel of information for governments [57].…”

“…This study also uses impact power (IP) to indicate the extent and coverage of security issues reported in social media. In general, if the IP is greater, the companies will suffer larger losses [35].…”