Analyzing Sustainability Messaging in Large-Scale Corporate Social Media

TL;DR

This paper presents a multimodal analysis pipeline using large foundation models to analyze corporate sustainability messaging on social media, revealing sectoral, temporal, and engagement patterns without extensive manual annotation.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, multimodal framework combining LLMs and VLMs for analyzing sustainability communication in social media, avoiding costly annotations and uncovering new insights.

Findings

Sectoral differences in SDG engagement

Temporal trends in sustainability messaging

Associations between messaging, ESG risks, and engagement

Abstract

In this work, we introduce a multimodal analysis pipeline that leverages large foundation models in vision and language to analyze corporate social media content, with a focus on sustainability-related communication. Addressing the challenges of evolving, multimodal, and often ambiguous corporate messaging on platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), we employ an ensemble of large language models (LLMs) to annotate a large corpus of corporate tweets on their topical alignment with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This approach avoids the need for costly, task-specific annotations and explores the potential of such models as ad-hoc annotators for social media data that can efficiently capture both explicit and implicit references to sustainability themes in a scalable manner. Complementing this textual analysis, we utilize vision-language models (VLMs), within a visual understanding framework that uses semantic clusters to uncover patterns in visual sustainability communication. This integrated approach reveals sectoral differences in SDG engagement, temporal trends, and associations between corporate messaging, environmental, social, governance (ESG) risks, and consumer engagement. Our methods-automatic label generation and semantic visual clustering-are broadly applicable to other domains and offer a flexible framework for large-scale social media analysis.