Um escudo contra fake news? A influência da reputação corporativa na intenção de compartilhamento de notícias empresariais nas redes sociais on-line

Abstract

This research aims to examine the influence of corporate reputation, news veracity and news valence on the intention to share business news on social network sites. What motivated this research was the increase in the number of false business news on social network sites and the lack of empirical research helping to understand and combat the dissemination of these news on social networks. The investigation method is an online factorial experiment 2 (corporate reputation: unfavorable vs favorable) x 2 (veracity: false vs true) x 2 (valence: negative vs positive) randomized in complete blocks and the subjects are 369 social media users with some familiarity with the companies mentioned on the experimental stimulus. The experimental stimulus consists of eight business news extracted from the internet. The data were collected through an online survey and analyzed using the three-way analysis of variance technique (ANOVA). The results shows that corporate reputation, veracity and valence can influence the intention to share in thirteen ways. Among the ways, the results highlight that a favorable corporate reputation can mitigate the intention to share false negative news and enhance the intention to share false positive news, serving as a “double-edged sword”, instead of “shield”, in combating the spread of false news. This study can be used by managers and researchers to understand false news sharing on social networks, to identify the antecedents of this sharing and to outline strategies to combat and prevent the sharing of false negative news about companies through corporate reputation, among other things.