Recovering from Scandals: Twitter Coverage of Oxfam and Save the Children Scandals

Rebecca Scurlock1, Nives Dolsak2, Aseem Prakash3
1University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
2University of Washington, Seattle, USA
3University of Washington SEATTLE USA

Tóm tắt

We examine Twitter data to assess the impact of media exposes on the reputations of two international nonprofits, Oxfam and Save the Children (STC). Using a random sample of 6794 Tweets, we study the daily gap between positive and negative sentiments expressed towards these organizations. The “unweighted gap” and the “weighted gap” (weighted by the number of followers) of the Twitter handle follow broadly the same trajectory with high fluctuation in response to new negative or positive media stories. Twitter handles with large audiences amplify variability in weighted gap. While Oxfam’s reputation did not fully recover to pre-Haiti levels even 6 months after the scandal, STC’s reputation returned to pre-scandal levels in 8 days, although it fluctuated in response to new revelations. Overall, reputation recovery for both organizations was aided when they received celebrity endorsements and focused public attention on their positive activities, especially by linking to visible global events.

Tài liệu tham khảo

Agarwal, A., Xie, B., Vovsha, I., Rambow, O., & Passonneau, R. (2011). Sentiment analysis of twitter data. In Proceedings of the workshop on languages in social media (pp. 30–38). Association for Computational Linguistics. Alhidari, I. S., Veludo-de-Oliveira, T. M., Yousafzai, S. Y., & Yani-de-Soriano, M. (2018). Modeling the effect of multidimensional trust on individual monetary donations to charitable organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,47(3), 623–644. Amigó, E., Corujo, A., Gonzalo, J., Meij, E., & de Rijke, M. (2012). Overview of RepLab 2012: Evaluating online reputation management systems. In CLEF (Online Working Notes/Labs/Workshop). Amigó, E., De Albornoz, J. C., Chugur, I., Corujo, A., Gonzalo, J., Martín, T., Meij, E., de Rijke, M., & Spina, D. (2013). Overview of RepLab 2013: Evaluating online reputation monitoring systems. In International conference of the cross-language evaluation forum for european languages (pp. 333–352). Berlin: Springer. Bao, Y., Quan, C., Wang, L., & Ren, F. (2014). The role of pre-processing in Twitter sentiment analysis. In International conference on intelligent computing (pp. 615–624). Cham: Springer. Barbosa, L., & Feng, J. (2010, August). Robust sentiment detection on twitter from biased and noisy data. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on computational linguistics: posters (pp. 36–44). Association for Computational Linguistics. Bekkers, R. (2003). Trust, accreditation, and philanthropy in the Netherlands. Nonprofit and Volun-tary Sector Quarterly,32, 596–615. Bennett, R., & Gabriel, H. (2003). Image and reputational characteristics of UK charitable organizations: An empirical study. Corporate Reputation Review,6(3), 276–289. Berghmans, M., Simons, M., & Vandenabeele, J. (2017). What is negotiated in negotiated accountability? The case of INGOs. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations,28(4), 1529–1561. Bollen, J., Gonçalves, B., Ruan, G., & Mao, H. (2011). Happiness is assortative in online social networks. Artificial Life,17(3), 237–251. Borge-Hoelthoefer, J., & Moreno, Y. (2012). Absence of influential spreaders in rumor dynamics. Physical Review E,85(026116), 1–5. Carpenter, D. P., & Krause, G. A. (2012). Reputation and public administration. Public Administration Review,72(1), 26–32. Castillo, C., El-Haddad, M., Pfeffer, J., & Stempeck, M. (2014). Characterizing the life cycle of online news stories using social media reactions. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 211–223). ACM. Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate Reputation Review,10(3), 163–176. Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (2006). Unpacking the halo effect: Reputation and crisis management. Journal of Communication Management,10(2), 123–137. Coombs, W. T., & Holladay, S. J. (2012). Amazon.com’s Orwellian nightmare: Exploring apology in an online environment. Journal of Communication Management,16(3), 280–295. Cottle, S., & Nolan, D. (2007). Global Humanitarianism and the changing media aid filed. Journalism Studies,8(6), 862–878. Downs, A. (1972). Up and down with ecology: The “issue-attention cycle”. Public Interest, 28, 38–50. Dupuy, K., & Prakash, A. (2018). Do donors reduce bilateral aid to countries with restrictive NGO laws? A panel study, 1993–2012. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,47(1), 89–106. Fombrun, C. J., & Van Riel, C. B. (1997). The reputational landscape. Corporate reputation eview,1(2), 5–13. Gibelman, M., & Gelman, S. R. (2004). A loss of credibility: Patterns of wrongdoing among nongovernmental organizations. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations,15(4), 355–381. Go, A., Bhayani, R., & Huang, L. (2009). Twitter sentiment classification using distant supervision. CS224 N Project Report, Stanford (Vol. 1 No. 12). Gonçalves, P., Araújo, M., Benevenuto, F., & Cha, M. (2013). Comparing and combining sentiment analysis methods. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on online social networks (pp. 27–38). ACM. Green, D. P., Zelizer, A., & Kirby, D. (2018). Publicizing scandal: Results from five field experiments. Quarterly Journal of Political Science,13(3), 237–261. Gunningham, N., Kagan, R. A., & Thornton, D. (2004). Social license and environmental protection: why businesses go beyond compliance. Law & Social Inquiry,29(2), 307–341. Guo, C., & Saxton, G. D. (2014). Tweeting social change: How social media are changing nonprofit advocacy. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,43(1), 57–79. Guo, C., & Saxton, G. D. (2018). Speaking and being heard: How nonprofit advocacy organizations gain attention on social media. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,47(1), 5–26. Hansmann, H. (1980). The role of nonprofit enterprise. Yale Law Review,89, 835–898. Jansen, B. J., Zhang, M., Sobel, K., & Chowdury, A. (2009). Twitter power: Tweets as electronic word of mouth. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,60(11), 2169–2188. Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (pp. 56–65). ACM. Jiang, L., Yu, M., Zhou, M., Liu, X., & Zhao, T. (2011). Target-dependent twitter sentiment classification. In Proceedings of the 49th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics: Human language technologies (Vol. 1, pp. 151–160). Association for Computational Linguistics. Jones, G. H., Jones, B. H., & Little, P. (2000). Reputation as reservoir: Buffering against loss in times of economic crisis. Corporate Reputation Review,3(1), 21. Keck, M. E., & Sikkink, K. (1998). Activists beyond borders: Advocacy networks in international politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. King, G., Schneer, B., & White, A. (2017). How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas. Science,358(6364), 776–780. Kouloumpis, E., Wilson, T., & Moore, J. D. (2011). Twitter sentiment analysis: The good the bad and the omg! Icwsm,11(538–541), 164. Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web (pp. 591–600). ACM. Lange, D., Lee, P. M., & Dai, Y. (2011). Organizational reputation: A review. Journal of Management,37(1), 153–184. Light, P. C. (2008). How Americans view charities: A report on charitable confidence, 2008. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution. Lovejoy, K., & Saxton, G. D. (2012). Information, community, and action: How nonprofit organizations use social media. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,17(3), 337–353. Mishina, Y., Block, E. S., & Mannor, M. J. (2012). The path dependence of organizational reputation: How social judgment influences assessments of capability and character. Strategic Management Journal,33(5), 459–477. Mohammad, S. M., Kiritchenko, S., & Zhu, X. (2013). NRC-Canada: Building the state-of-the-art in sentiment analysis of tweets. arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.6242. Pak, A., & Paroubek, P. (2010). Twitter as a corpus for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. In LREc (Vol. 10, No. 2010, pp. 1320–1326). Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication,62(2), 266–282. Prakash, A., & Gugerty, M. K. (2010). Trust but verify? Voluntary regulation programs in the nonprofit sector. Regulation Governance, 4(1), 22–47. Riquelme, F., & Gonzalez-Cantergiani, P. (2016). Measuring user influence on Twitter: A survey. Information Processing and Management,52, 949–975. Rose-Ackerman, S. (1996). Altruism, nonprofits and economic theory. Journal of Economic Literature,34, 701–728. Savedoff, W., Glassman, A., & Madan, J. (2016). Global health, aid and corruption: Can we escape the scandal cycle? (Vol. 86). CGD Policy Paper. Schultz, F., Utz, S., & Göritz, A. (2011). Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media. Public Relations Review,37(1), 20–27. Sloan, M. (2009). The effects of nonprofit accountability ratings on donor behavior. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,38, 220–236. Smith, S. R., & Lipsky, M. (1993). Nonprofits for hire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stavrakantonakis, I., Gagiu, A. E., Kasper, H., Toma, I., & Thalhammer, A. (2012). An approach for evaluation of social media monitoring tools. Common Value Management,52(1), 52–64. Stever, G. S., & Lawson, K. (2013). Twitter as a way for celebrities to communicate with fans: Implications for the study of parasocial interaction. North American journal of psychology,15(2), 339–354. Svensson, P. G., Mahoney, T. Q., & Hambrick, M. E. (2015). Twitter as a communication tool for nonprofits: A study of sport-for-development organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly,44(6), 1086–1106. Szper, R., & Prakash, A. (2011). Charity watchdogs and the limits of information-based regulation. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations,22(1), 112–141. Thøgersen, J. (2006). Media attention and the market for ‘green’ consumer products. Business Strategy and the Environment,15(3), 145–156. Torres-Moraga, E., Vásquez-Parraga, A., & Barra, C. (2010). Antecedents of donor trust in an emerging charity sector: the role of reputation, familiarity, opportunism and communication. Transylvanian Review of Administrative Sciences,6(29), 159–177. Vasterman, P. L. (2005). Media-hype: Self-reinforcing news waves, journalistic standards and the construction of social problems. European Journal of Communication,20(4), 508–530. Weisbrod, B. (1988). The nonprofit economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wien, C., & Elmelund-Præstekær, C. (2009). An anatomy of media hypes: Developing a model for the dynamics and structure of intense media coverage of single issues. European Journal of Communication,24(2), 183–201. Yu, T., & Lester, R. H. (2008). Moving beyond firm boundaries: A social network perspective on reputation spillover. Corporate Reputation Review,11(1), 94–108.