Silence is golden? Mitigating different types of online firestorms of Fortune 100 corporations on Twitter

Guided by crisis communication literature, the study addresses the importance of sentiments in corporate online firestorms, with a focus on the effectiveness of different immediate response strategies (explanatory vs. sympathetic response vs. silence) on mitigating the negative sentimental discussions and engagement behaviors. It also aims to clarify the relationship between different types of online firestorms (ability vs. social responsibility online firestorms) and intensity of negative sentiments from the online public. Leveraging unobtrusive data and computational methods, we employed a DID design to test the causal effects of response strategies on 335 online firestorms on Twitter to answer the concerned questions. Results showed that silence strategy functioned better than the other two strategies in reducing the negative sentiments and engagement behaviors in online firestorms on Twitter. Moreover, sympathetic response strategy would rather elicit more likes and retweets engagement behaviors in social responsibility-online firestorms than in ability-online firestorms. This study also revealed that there were generally more social responsibility online firestorms than ability-related ones on Twitter, whereas no sentiment differences were identified in the two types of online firestorms. Theoretical advancement, practical implications, and methodological contribution were discussed in detail.