An application of the ELM model to information sharing on Twitter: Studying the Role of Message Form and Sender Profile

This paper focuses on the information sharing behaviour of users within a micro-blogging platform, Twitter. We propose an explanatory model of the performance of a message by taking into account the external cues (source and form of the message) beyond the content and meaning of the text, and we test it empirically, on a corpus of nearly 800,000 original tweets sent by about 235,000 users over a period of 7 months concerning the Covid-19 epidemic in France. We thus show the importance of the source’s credibility and its strategy on the platform, but also of the form of the post, its composition and its degree of elaboration. These elements are nuanced by the level of engagement of the source in the topic of conversation on which it intervenes and by the context in which these messages are sent and received.
JEL Code: M31