Sustainability communication on Twitter: disability disclosures of listed companies in Poland

Abstract

Objectives A rapidly growing corporate use of social media can support corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability advocacy of listed companies enhancing the positive image of people with disabilities and social inclusion. Emphasizing CSR towards people with disability (D), abbreviated CSR+D or CSR-D, is customary. The aim of the study is to examine the use of Twitter to highlight advocacy efforts for people with disabilities by the sixty best sustainability-oriented WSE listed companies in Poland. Material and methods We examined keywords and their popularity and context using topic modeling and text mining based on corporate tweets. Tweets’ topics were extracted using the DMM model from 154,496 company media uploads. Then, the occurring themes were determined. Results The results indicate a very limited promotion of CSR activities on Twitter. Accordingly, also limited use of Twitter in communicating disability with no diffusion of topics was observed, despite an overall increase of corporate social media use. Disability issues were are far more often communicated for high-profile events related to disability. Only a few tweets appeared on Down syndrome, with more frequent tweets referring to visual, hearing, or autism disorders. However, tweets about disability receive more users’ reactions and gain a wider audience than example those related to seniors or climate. More results on topics and their popularity due to the sector, time and accompanying events were included. Conclusions The research contribute to understanding of the evolving social media tools and their corporate whereas there is limited or paid access to data.

Keywords

• twitter communication
• disability
• corporate social responsibility
• social media
• text mining
• topic modeling
• corporate communication