Voices in action AI-powered insights from corporate messaging during societal crises

This dissertation investigates the conditions under which organisational communication on contested societal issues generates stakeholder engagement and behavioural outcomes in digital environments where CEOs, brands, and citizens simultaneously shape public discourse. Combining computational analysis of more than 250,000 social media posts with controlled experiments, it examines three complementary domains: geopolitical conflict, social justice controversy, and complex global challenges.
Chapter 2 analyses 236,119 tweets on the Russia-Ukraine war and shows that CEO communications outperform brand communications across all engagement metrics, with three-way interactions between sender, framing, and appeal type. CEO messages combining other-focused framing with emotional appeal, and brand messages addressing domestic concerns, prove most effective for driving digital activism.
Chapter 3 examines how decentralised political user-generated content (PUGC) interacts with brand DEI strategies. Across 3,874 Facebook and Instagram posts about 28 global brands and a complementary experiment, supportive congruence (pro-DEI PUGC with maintained commitments) produces strong positive engagement, while oppositional congruence produces weak effects, mediated by public-serving motive attributions. This pattern reveals a normative asymmetry in dual-source evaluative alignment.
Chapter 4 investigates emoji symbolism in brand Sustainable Development Goals messaging. Across 13,698 posts from six global brands and a controlled experiment, symbol emojis produce a 281% relative increase in engagement with SDG content and buffer the negative effects of low brand-SDG fit.
These findings demonstrate that organisational communication on contested issues operates within multivocal ecosystems where the conditions of delivery determine outcomes.