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Social media (SM) platforms have become major sources for generating, sharing and gathering political and election news. Although there appears to be an assumption that reliance on SM for political news consumption will continue to gain in popularity, there are reasons to believe that many Americans are retreating from using SM for political news. The purpose of this study is to examine if Americans are reducing reliance on SM for political news and to analyze why retreat may be happening.

Using longitudinal panel data from Pew’s American Trends Panel study, the authors tracked 993 respondents from February of 2016 to November of 2019 to monitor their reliance on SM for political news leading up to the 2020 US presidential election.

The results of this study indicate that a sizeable percentage of people (about a third) are retreating from SM platforms for political news consumption and some are abandoning it altogether – people we refer to as new SM “nones.” The authors find that retreat from SM is associated with increased distrust of the information found on the platforms. Concerns about fake news, incivility on SM and information overload were unrelated to retreat from use of SM for political news consumption.

The findings of this study are novel and suggest that reliance on SM for political news by the public may have waxed, seen its zenith and may now be waning largely because of distrust in the information found on SM platforms.

Audit rotation (AR) is a key policy initiative implemented in global jurisdictions to deal with concerns about audit quality. Auditing financial reports involves communicating attested value-relevant company information to investors, and hence audit quality plays a role in the quality of financial reporting information. This paper aims to investigate whether AR affects the degree of information asymmetry (IS) between investors. It further aims to examine whether voluntary AR results in less asymmetric information compared to mandatory AR. Additionally, it examines whether political connections moderate the association between AR and IS.

The authors use data from publicly traded banks across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) for the period 2010–2018. The authors include several variables to control for corporate governance and other firm-specific characteristics by using country-year fixed-effects regression model.

The authors find higher IS for banks that periodically rotate auditor, while banks voluntarily choose to rotate auditors obtain high-quality audits, which results in higher trading volume and lower stock return volatility, hence lower IS. The results suggest that when banks voluntarily choose to rotate auditors, investors perceive these banks as more committed to obtaining high-quality audits relative to mandatory AR. Providing higher quality audits enhances the credibility of reported information and thus reduce the level of IS. Moreover, IS following AR is higher for politically connected banks than for similar but politically unconnected banks. Finally, investors perceive voluntary AR as a disciplining tool, which mitigates IS. This mitigating role is not affected by bank political connectedness.

This study has limitations as the definition of AR could be interpreted as binary or too narrow, and hence it may not be appropriate to generalize findings to different contexts. Nonetheless, this study casts light on a new perspective to reconcile the existing mixed evidence on the influence of AR on IS and the moderating role of political connections. A further limitation is that because of data unavailability, the authors were unable to use other proxies (e.g. bid-ask spreads and analyst forecast dispersion) of IS.

The present findings provide insight to regulators, policymakers and standard setters on the potential adverse effect of political connections on the role of AR in mitigating IS. The results underscore the importance of voluntary AR, and suggest that regulators, policymakers and standard setters encourage firms to rotate their auditors periodically.

This study provides evidence in a setting that is unique at the economic, social and regulatory levels. Prior literature is lacking and has been centered on developed countries or focusing on single-country specifications. The data set of this study is unique and allows us to examine the interplay between political influence that arises through ownership and management roles of influential members of state.

Unlike other types of corporate disclosure, corporate political disclosure (CPD), which is the disclosure of corporate political contributions and the related governing policies and oversight mechanisms, does not provide completely new information to stakeholders. Some of the information disclosed in CPD is available from other public records (e.g. the Federal Election Committee website or OpenSecrets website). Given this unique feature of CPD, it is interesting to investigate the cost and benefit tradeoff for firms of altering their CPD practice in response to policy and political uncertainty.

This study employs recently developed indexes of aggregate economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and a novel dataset of CPD transparency to examine the impact of EPU on CPD transparency and how the proprietary cost of corporate political activities moderates this association. The sample consists of S&P 500 companies from the 2012 to 2019 period.

The authors document that firms mitigate the heightened information asymmetry associated with higher aggregate EPU by increasing CPD transparency. The positive association between EPU and CPD is less pronounced for firms that are more sensitive to EPU, for firms that more actively manage EPU through corporate political contributions or lobbying activities and for firms that are followed by more analysts. The authors also find that more transparent CPD helps to mitigate the information asymmetry caused by heightened EPU. This study’s results hold when the authors control for other types of voluntary corporate disclosure.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the determinants of CPD transparency by identifying EPU's positive impact on CPD transparency. This study also provides empirical evidence that the proprietary costs arising from the controversial nature of corporate political activities dampen firms' incentives to provide transparent CPD in response to heightened EPU, and that information on corporate political activities gathered and processed by financial analysts seems to lower the marginal benefit to companies of publicizing CPD on their own website.

Based on social capital theory and the institutional theory, this paper aims to explain how a firm’s business ties and political ties affect contractual governance in an interfirm cooperation, and under which institutional conditions they can play a better role.

This study tests conceptual model using questionnaire survey data collected from 227 firms in China. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that business ties have significant effect on contract completeness, while political ties have significant effect on contract enforcement. Moreover, these effects are contingent on some institutional factors. Market information transparency strengthens the effect of business ties on contract completeness and weakens the effect of political ties on contract completeness. Legal system completeness weakens the effect of political ties on contract enforcement.

This study suggests that managers could actively and selectively use their managerial ties to enhance contractual governance in an interfirm cooperation.

This study adds to the current understanding of how an interfirm cooperation is shaped by the firm’s social capital derived from external network relationships and extends the research on what social antecedents affect contractual governance. Moreover, this study sheds new light on when managerial ties can play a more beneficial role in emerging economies.

Guided by the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS), this article identifies significant predictors that impact individuals seeking COVID-19 information. People with different political ideologies read contradictory information about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, how political ideology may affect COVID-19 information seeking remains unclear. This study explores the major information channels for individuals with different political ideologies to seek COVID-19 information. It further examines how political ideologies influence CMIS's effectiveness in predicting online health information-seeking.

This study collected 394 completed survey responses from adults living in the United States after the 2020 lockdown. ANOVA analyses revealed the differences in salience, beliefs, information carrier characteristics, utilities and information-seeking actions between Liberals and Conservatives. Regression analyses discovered variables that predict Liberals' and Conservatives' online health information seeking.

Results suggest that the internet is the top channel for COVID-19 information seeking. Compared to Conservatives, Liberals report more COVID-19 information-seeking actions. Liberals also express stronger salience, perceive higher trustworthiness of online COVID-19 information, are more likely to think of seeking online COVID-19 information as useful and helpful and report more substantial efficacy to mitigate the risk. Most CMIS variables predict Liberals' information seeking; however, only salience significantly predicts Conservatives' information seeking.

This article indicates that CMIS should include political ideology to refine its prediction of information seeking. These findings offer practical implications for designing health messages, enhancing information distribution and reducing the public's uncertainty.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2022-0436.

The purpose of this study is to examine the knowledge gap hypothesis in the context of smartphone use for news to understand whether mobile news consumption could bridge or widen the knowledge gap between people of higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES).

The authors examine how smartphone news consumption is associated with the knowledge gap hypothesis by analyzing a survey dataset from Hong Kong. This study focuses specifically on a moderated mediation model in which the indirect effect of mobile news consumption on political knowledge via discussion network heterogeneity is contingent on level of education.

Smartphone use for news/information was positively associated with level of discussion network heterogeneity. The indirect effect of smartphone news use on political knowledge via discussion network heterogeneity was stronger for those with lower levels of education.

This study advances the understanding of the role of smartphone use in contributing to the functioning of deliberative democracy as this use enhances discussion network heterogeneity and general levels of political knowledge. Moreover, our study contributes to the literature on the knowledge gap by not only examining the relationship between smartphone use, discussion heterogeneity, and political knowledge but also taking into consideration individual levels of education.

Informational use of social media facilitates political engagement. Yet, there is also evidence of the perils of frequent political engagement in misinformation propagation. This study aims to examine the association between online political engagement, perceived exposure to misinformation, individuals’ cognitive characteristics and misinformation sharing.

In this paper, online surveys were conducted in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2).

Study 1 finds that online political engagement is positively associated with perceived exposure to and sharing of misinformation. Mediation analyses suggest that the relationship between online political engagement and misinformation sharing is mediated by perceived exposure to misinformation. Further, the likelihood of sharing misinformation is found to increase at higher levels of online political engagement, but those with low need for cognition (NFC) are more vulnerable to such sharing. Study 2 explores cognitive ability in place of NFC. The results follow similar patterns as Study 1 – online political engagement is linked to misinformation sharing via higher perceived exposure to misinformation. The authors also find that the tendency to share misinformation increases with frequent exposure to misinformation but those with lower cognitive ability are more prone to such sharing.

In both contexts, the data show that perceived exposure to misinformation mediates the relationship between online political engagement and misinformation sharing and those with low NFC and cognitive ability are more vulnerable. Overall, the findings offer insight into the mechanisms of political engagement and sharing misinformation.

Social media has made people better informed but also easier to manipulate. By using literature review and observing social media, the authors found a problem about echo chamber effect. The purpose of this paper is to know how the echo chamber affects the people who consume political news and the role of media diversity in it.

To conduct this study, the authors used a structured questionnaire on the Qualtrics platform to collect data from 183 participants. The authors collected data using a simple random technique. This study is based on the cross-sectional survey; the data collection period is from October to November 2023. The authors used the SPSS software to analyze the relationships between the variables and test the hypothesis.

This study found that, echo chamber is not affected by media diversity. Because of increased political interest, people will be less influenced by echo chambers. In addition, demographic factors affect political interest. People use search engines and social media sites instead of political websites when it comes to the consumption of political news online. People like to communicate with individuals who hold conflicting political views.

Researchers have not yet been able to gain a clear understanding of whether users are in an echo chamber or not and how they are interacting in that environment. Research on this topic is still going on from different perspectives. This study helped to clarify whether or not more media consumption will affect echo chambers. The possibility of being trapped in an echo chamber exists whether we use a single medium or a variety of media. The novelty of this study lies in the use of the echo chamber scale to investigate a thorough understanding of this word through the use of many factors.

This study examined how likeminded Facebook comments with incivility and without supporting evidence influence readers' evaluations of the commenter and online political participation intention. This study also investigated whether the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters is contingent on the strength of partisanship.

The study used a 2 (uncivil comments vs civil comments) × 2 (comments without supporting evidence vs comments with supporting evidence) factorial design with a scenario about reading similar viewpoints about the gun control issue in Facebook comments.

The results showed that compared to exposure to civil agreeing comments, exposure to uncivil likeminded comments resulted in higher levels of negative evaluations of the commenters, which in turn decreased willingness to participate in political activities online. Exposure to comments without evidence led to more negative evaluations of the commenters, but it did not significantly influence online political participation. In addition, the strength of partisanship did not significantly moderate the indirect effect of exposure to uncivil comments and comments without evidence on online political participation through evaluations of the commenters.

Although previous studies have demonstrated the significant effects of incivility and reasoned argument, little is known about whether and how people evaluate ingroup members' comments that are uncivil and lacking reasoned arguments. Most of these studies have examined incivility in political contexts, but few have extended the context to the effect of likeminded comments, especially when the comments are uncivil and lack supporting evidence. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

This study aims to investigate whether objective and subjective rationality affects individual voters’ use of accounting information and if such use affects voting behavior. While prior accounting studies assume voter rationality concerning financial performance and political outcomes, this study distinguishes between two types of voters: objective rational voters (who make voting decisions about multiple alternatives based on objective information) and subjective rational voters (who make decisions based on their subjective values, and thus do not explore information or explore only information biased toward one alternative). This study expects that accounting information can influence the voting behavior of objective and subjective rational voters.

Focusing on the 2020 Osaka Metropolitan Plan Referendum, this study used an online survey conducted on 768 respondents after the referendum.

This study finds that objective rational voters use accounting information more than subjective rational voters, voters who used accounting information were more likely to vote against the referendum, and voting behavior is not directly affected by the type of rationality of voters; rather, objective rational voters are more likely to use accounting information that has a mediating effect on voting behavior.

The results advance the understanding of public sector accounting research and practices by providing evidence of the individual voter’s use of accounting information and their voting behavior in political contexts.