A shield against fake news? The influence of corporate reputation on
intention to share fake news about business on social network sites
Corporate fake news. News sharing. Corporate reputation. Social
network sites. Experimental research.
This research aims to examine the influence of corporate reputation,
veracity and valence on the intention to share false 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 are eight business
news extracted from the internet. The data were collected through an online
survey on intention to share news, among other variables, and analyzed using
the three-way analysis of variance technique (ANOVA). The results show that
corporate reputation, veracity and valence can influence the intention to share
in different ways. In particular, the results suggest that favorable corporate
reputation can act as a "shield" against false negative news, but not against
false positive news – regarding false positive news, favorable corporate
reputation can increase the intention to share. From a theoretical point of view,
this research can be used by students and researchers to understand false
news sharing and the effects of corporate reputation. From a practical point of
view, this research can be used by managers to monitor corporate reputation
and delineate strategies to combat the spread of false negative news through
the company's reputation.