Musk’s takeover of Twitter: Assessing the reputational damage to the corporate world

Corporate reputation holds great significance in the business world, shaping how companies are perceived by society. Beyond traditional media, social media has emerged as a major influence on the corporate sector's reputation. On social media, content related to companies is generated not only by corporations and journalists but by any user on the platform. In this context, content moderation plays a crucial role. After acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk implemented significant changes to the platform’s content moderation policies. On Facebook, however, the content moderation policy remained unaffected by Musk's acquisition of Twitter. In this study, we analyzed the impact of Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, now rebranded as X, on corporate reputation on the platform. Using a general-purpose crawler and a theoretical model of media reputation based on written content, we built a dataset to compare the changes in corporate reputation on Twitter/X and Facebook before and after Musk's takeover. We employed mixed-effects regression models to test the effect of the acquisition on corporate reputation. Our findings clearly indicate that corporate reputation on X declined following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Conversely, corporate reputation levels on Facebook remained stable. These results underscore the reputational risks associated with a company’s presence on social media platforms and highlight the relevance of these platforms for society.