@article{e40ba03a6c0c4b449743345a05470e2e,
title = "Do firms strategically disseminate? evidence from corporate use of social media",
abstract = "We examine whether firms use social media to strategically disseminate financial information. Analyzing S&P 1500 firms' use of Twitter to disseminate quarterly earnings announcements, we find that firms are less likely to disseminate when the news is bad and when the magnitude of the bad news is worse, consistent with strategic behavior. Furthermore, firms tend to send fewer earnings announcement tweets and {"}rehash{"} tweets when the news is bad. Cross-sectional analyses suggest that incentives for strategic dissemination are higher for firms with a lower level of investor sophistication and firms with a larger social media audience. We also find that strategic dissemination behavior is detectable in high litigation risk firms, but not low litigation risk firms. Finally, we find that the tweeting of bad news and the subsequent retweeting of that news by a firm's followers are associated with more negative news articles written about the firm by the traditional media, highlighting a potential downside to Twitter dissemination.",
keywords = "Social Media, Strategic Disclosure, Strategic Dissemination, Twitter",
author = "Jung, {Michael J.} and Naughton, {James P.} and Ahmed Tahoun and Clare Wang",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Mark Bradshaw, two anonymous reviewers, Greg Miller, Annie Loo Muramoto, Shiva Rajgopal, Elizabeth Shah, Beverly Walther, Peter Wysocki, and workshop participants at New York University, The Ohio State University, The University of Iowa, University of Miami, Washington University in St. Louis, the 2013 University of North Carolina/Duke University Fall Camp, the 2014 Conference on the Regulation of Financial Markets and our discussant Michelle Lowry, and the 2016 Wharton Spring Accounting Conference for their comments and suggestions. James P. Naughton and Clare Wang are grateful for the funding of this research by the Kellogg School of Management and the Lawrence Revsine Research Fellowship. Ahmed Tahoun is grateful for the funding of this research by London Business School and the financial contribution of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (research project ECO2013-48208-P). We thank our numerous research assistants, especially Leland Bybee, Siladitya Mohanti, Stacey Ni, Venkat Reddy, and Melody Xu for providing excellent research assistance. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 American Accounting Association. All rights reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = jul,
doi = "10.2308/accr-51906",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "93",
pages = "225--252",
journal = "Accounting Review",
issn = "0001-4826",
publisher = "American Accounting Association",
number = "4",
}