Beyond Business: A Poster Contrasting CEO Activism on Social Media in India and the United States Arshia Arya ∗ Microsoft Research India. arshia1012@gmail.com Shehla Rashid Shora ∗ Microsoft Research India. shehla.shora@gmail.com Joyojeet Pal Microsoft Research India. joyojeet.pal@microsoft.com ABSTRACT We studied the Twitter activity of business leaders of top 250 com- panies in India and the US between January, 2019 and May, 2021 and looked for trends related to cause-related messaging through a top- ical analysis of their tweets. Using a Word2Vec bag of words model for textual classifcation, we quantifed their engagement with socio- political messaging, using keywords related to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). We found that messag- ing on themes that have widespread social purchase and are not politically sensitive is relatively comparable across the two coun- tries, but that results difer vastly on issues of political sensitivity. Our results point at the complex relationship between business and politics in the two countries, and the growing importance of social media in signalling those. We conclude by pointing out the impor- tance of these fndings for political science and policy research and by highlighting the scope for future work in this area. CCS CONCEPTS · Information systems → Social networks. KEYWORDS society and technology, business studies, corporate social advocacy, corporate activism, sustainable development goals, social media studies, CEO activism ACM Reference Format: Arshia Arya, Shehla Rashid Shora, and Joyojeet Pal. 2021. Beyond Business: A Poster Contrasting CEO Activism on Social Media in India and the United States. In ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) (COMPASS ’21), June 28-July 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471983 1 INTRODUCTION In recent years, political and social engagement by business leaders, referred to as ‘CEO Activism’ [2, 5, 6, 16ś18] has emerged as an area of academic interest within the larger themes of corporate activism [7, 8] and corporate citizenship [1, 10, 12]. Most studies on the subject of emerge out of the US [5, 6, 8, 11, 22], where CEOs ∗ Both authors contributed equally to this research. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. COMPASS ’21, June 28-July 2, 2021, Virtual Event, Australia © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-8453-7/21/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471983 have taken public stances on controversial issues which are well- known and widely reported in the press. However, these studies are mostly qualitative and purposively sampled [8] and do not leverage computational social science methods. While these studies are rich in analyses [6, 8, 22], the sampling methods are usually purposive rather than systematic, often focusing on the most outspoken CEOs or the most controversial statements [6, 8]. Most studies on CEO Activism also do not use social media analytics, even as they might quote social media posts [6]. Various studies that do analyse the social media engagement of business leaders [14, 19] do not probe questions related to politi- cally inclined engagement of CEOs, focusing instead on general trends in social media engagement. Similarly, there is very little comparative work in the area of CEO Activism per se, even though studies comparing the general trends in social media use of CEOs across polities exist [4]. Through an analysis of 50 social media pages of corporate organisations in China and the US, Men and Tsai [13] found that cultural diferences infuence the way in which com- panies conduct their social media engagement. The diferences in CEO messaging across cultures and contexts is of relevance to busi- ness studies as also to curriculum development in business schools in that leadership styles vary according to cultures and contexts, and that there is no singular playbook for CEO communication. A greater understanding of the diferences in which CEOs across contexts tend to express themselves also has relevance for political science, as it could give us insights into the extent of afnity or diferentiation between the state and businesses. While studies on the impact of CEO Activism on the policy envi- ronment exist [6], the role of a nation state’s polity on CEO activism itself has not been studied. Comparative studies of CEO activism across countries can help us understand this relationship. Current studies tend to be set in the West, where institutional protections for free speech enable certain forms of brand outspokenness that allow corporations much more freedom to craft their message as closely as possible to their political or social preferences of their customers. The recent tussle between Twitter and the Government of India [20] over issues of censorship and platform liability illu- minates this to some extent. Studies on CEO activism in the US could beneft from comparative analyses, as the policy environment surrounding free speech can act as a control variable in observing brand activism as a phenomenon. A lot of work on CEO Activism concerns motivations of the frms or CEOs themselves, or of their audience [22]. Brown, Manegold and Marquardt [3] contend that the rise in CEO activism and corpo- rate activism in general can be attributed to the fact that politics is becoming more divisive, and that companies’ interests are increas- ingly tied to the ways they are perceived in the public. Hochberg 432