Social media has emerged as a vital tool to advance two-way communication between companies and customers. This paper uses 29,764 tweets to investigate a sustainability fraud crisis, the Volkswagen emissions scandal. We provide a Tweet Analytic Framework comprising three approaches: cluster analysis, sentiment analysis, and time series analysis. This paper explores public opinions regarding the Volkswagen emissions scandal in two stages and reveals the typical crisis development trend, the strong condemnation and negative sentiment, and significant public concerns. This paper can yield important insights for understanding how customers’ opinions change, thereby improving the effectiveness of managing sustainability fraud crises.
Ding et al. (Wed,) studied this question.