Diffusion of tax-related communication on social media

Abstract

Taxation is a recurrent topic in people's conversations, also on social media. Yet, informal channels such as social media have been widely neglected in studies that examined how information about taxation spreads across social networks. Using posts on Twitter (currently called “X”) with taxation related hashtags from 2010 to 2020, we examined what linguistic cues are associated with information diffusion, that is, the number of retweets a message receives. The use of emotional, moral, and moral-emotional language in a tweet was associated with greater diffusion (i.e., more retweets). In contrast to the negativity bias literature, positive emotional words were more strongly associated with information diffusion than negative emotional words. Among the specific emotions that taxation research has focused on, only the use of anger (but not anxiety) words was associated with more retweets. The study contributes to the literature by examining individuals’ reasoning about taxes.