Sharing Native Advertising on Twitter: Content Analyses Examining Disclosure Practices and Their Inoculating Influence

ABSTRACT

Based upon a 3-year data set of Tweets linking to native advertising from leading U.S. news publications, this study provides human content analyses (n = 1,527) of the practice of native advertising disclosure in the field – both on publisher websites and when shared on Twitter – and explores whether disclosures serve the inoculating function of resistance to persuasion. Leveraging the Persuasion Knowledge Model (Friestad and Wright [1994]. “The persuasion knowledge model: How people cope with persuasion attempts.” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (June): 1–31) and inoculation theory (McGuire [1964]. “Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches.” In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, edited by L. Berkowitz, 191–229. New York: Academic Press.), results show a) regular use of disclosures on publisher landing pages, b) the absence of disclosures in over half of publisher Twitter Cards, and c) the presence of disclosures corresponded to an increased likelihood of negatively-valenced Twitter posts.

KEYWORDS:

• Persuasion Knowledge Model
• inoculation theory
• native advertising
• social media
• journalism
• content analysis
  

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this paper was presented to the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in August, 2019. We thank Brittany Brown and Nitya Ravi for their research assistance as well as the anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions to improve our manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One exception is Krouwer, Poels, and Paulussen (2020) who demonstrated higher levels of ad recognition. However, the goal of the study was to test the effects of more detailed disclosures that are not currently in use. Moreover, their operationalization and coding of this measure differed from other studies.

2 The distribution across publishers was similar to the sampling frame: The Wall Street Journal (46.8%), Business Insider (30.7%), The Washington Post (12.2%), The New York Times (9.3%), and Politico (1.0%).

3 All analyses were conducted using IBM’s SPSS v.24.

4 Eight percent (8%) of articles were no longer accessible at the time of data analysis.