The effects of a client's social media disclosure and audience engagement on auditor judgment

Sanaz Aghazadeh, J.Owen Brown, Laura Guichard Latiolais and Thomas J. Phillips

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2024, vol. 113, issue C

Abstract: The rapid rise of social media enables companies to disclose information to the public instantly. Thus, auditors may initially receive client information via a client's social media account instead of through private, client-to-auditor communication. Drawing on Social Penetration Theory, we conduct an experiment to investigate how a client's initial disclosure via social media (versus private disclosure) and audience engagement of the client's posts (e.g., number of “likes,” “replies,” and “reposts”) affects auditors' perception of the auditor-client relationship and their evaluation of the client-provided information. We find that when auditors initially receive client information via social media with high audience engagement, they are less willing to accept the client's preference than when the same information is disclosed privately or publicly with minimal audience engagement. Our findings are consistent with auditors perceiving client disclosure via social media with high audience engagement as a significant violation of their communication expectations such that their relational closeness with the client weakens and causes them to respond critically. We contribute to the literature on the use of social media for corporate disclosure, which has implications for the auditor-client relationship and audit quality.

Keywords: Audience engagement; Auditor-client relationship; Social media; Social penetration theory; Twitter; X (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368224000242
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:113:y:2024:i:c:s0361368224000242

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2024.101564

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().