Balancing on a Digital Rope: How Large Corporations Engage in Digital Framing to Navigate Hashtag Activism

Through a data-driven, computationally intensive approach, this study explores how large corporations engage in hashtag activism to navigate public expectations and potential backlash. Informed by the lexicon of framing theory and by analyzing the social media posts of S&P 500 companies, we uncover the patterns and strategies in corporate hashtag activism (CHA), specifically how hashtags are employed as digital framing tools to manage sociopolitical discourse. Employing machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) techniques, the study maps corporate sociopolitical discourse in a two-dimensional semantic space, highlighting key sociopolitical frames. The study also provides empirical evidence of the selective participation of companies in hashtag activism through multiple corroborative analyses. Finally, based on algorithm-supported induction for building theory, we bring the insights together in a framework that highlights distinctive patterns of corporate discourse structure and hashtag use on social media.