How does disclosing information using Twitter affect a company^s sustainability performance?
Yanuar Nugroho(a*, b), Heru Tjaraka (a)

a) Doctoral Program in Accounting, Faculty of Economics & Business, Universitas Airlangga
*yanuar.nugroho-2022[at]feb.unair.ac.id
b) Faculty of Vocational Studies, Universitas Airlangga

Abstract

The inadequacy of paper-based disclosure coupled with the continuous development of information technology and the ubiquitous penetration of the internet into everyday life, has led to a paradigm shift in the field of corporate disclosure where companies are starting to adopt a new paradigm, namely online information disclosure. Twitter in particular, has changed the public conversation on a variety of topics. The length of news text on social media on a particular theme is a form of the company^s efforts to guide the opinions of its followers. If this is adjusted to the Twitter platform which has limited characters, more tweets about certain news indicates that the company is highlighting certain news, especially those related to good sustainability performance news. There is a limited possibility that companies take advantage of language ambiguity, which is one of the primary motivations for companies with bad news to make complex qualitative disclosures. Even if companies make qualitative tweets related to current earnings, they tend to be concise, clear, and intuitive. Thus, it would be difficult to obscure bad news with qualitative tweets. We are looking for official company Twitter accounts from companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2020-2022. We validate official and active Twitter accounts or official news/investor relations Twitter accounts using additional techniques. The results of this study support all the proposed hypotheses, our empirical results show that companies with good performance are more likely to spread performance news than companies with bad performance news. Companies with good earnings, social and environmental performance news are more likely to post qualitative statements regarding company performance evaluations than quantitative statements to attract investors^ attention to good performance news. Furthermore, companies that have good performance news tend to share more positive statements on Twitter than companies that

Keywords: disclosure, Twitter, sustainability, performance

Topic: Accounting and management information system