Remember when corporate America steered clear of politics on social media?

There was a time when corporate America was not very online. Most companies used social media for promoting products and services or engaging with consumers in a friendly fashion. Political posts on a company Twitter account were rare. That all changed between 2012-2022, when the volume of partisan speech on Twitter (now called X) from large corporations surged, more than doubling beginning in 2017, according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. Researchers said the spike was driven disproportionately by companies using language associated with Democratic politicians. The moves frequently had negative effects on company stock prices. In this edited conversation, the paper’s coauthor Elisabeth Kempf, Jaime and Raquel Gilinski Associate Professor of Business Administration, explains corporate Twitter’s abrupt shift. It seems ubiquitous now, but corporations putting out partisan-sounding tweets is only a recent development. What did you find? Partisan speech was very rare for companies. Less than 1 percent of all the tweets they sent between 2012 and 2017 would constitute what was, according to our measures, very partisan speech. Wading into partisan, polarized issues can be tricky for companies. We saw the first big change in 2017 where both Democratic and Republican partisan speech picks
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