What Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disclosures Do Chinese Forestry Firms Make on Social Media? Evidence from WeChat

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure serves as a vital bridge for forestry firms to communicate with their stakeholders and obtain legitimacy support. Existing studies focus on forestry firms’ CSR disclosures based on CSR reports but lack consideration of such disclosures on social media. In this study, based on WeChat, the most widely used social media platform in China, we obtained 3311 tweets from 36 WeChat Official Accounts (WOA) of 63 Chinese-listed forestry firms in 2018 and used content analysis to classify the CSR information involved in these tweets based on the stakeholder dimensions. The main analysis results show that the top three CSR dimensions disclosed by Chinese forestry firms in social media are the shareholder (28.21%), customer (26.20%), and employee (23.64%) dimensions, and there are also great differences in the subcontent of disclosure concerns in each stakeholder dimension, e.g., approximately 86% of CSR disclosures for customers are product and service information. Additionally, we conducted a content analysis on the CSR reports of forestry firms using WOA. The results show that firms express different concerns in CSR reports than on social media, and the most mentioned dimensions in their reports are the environment (23.69%), employees (20.91%), and shareholders (20.21%). This indicates that there is a significant difference between the stakeholders that Chinese forestry firms focus on in social media and those that they focus on in CSR reports. This paper is the first study to focus on the CSR disclosure of Chinese forestry firms in social media and provides a reference for scholars to understand the information activities of forestry firms in social media.