Messenger Nationality, Media Skepticism, and Crisis Communication Effectiveness: Huawei’s YouTube Messages as Perceived in the U.S.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the effect of messenger nationality on the credibility perception of YouTube sources in the theoretical context of situational crisis communication theory (SCCT). An online survey experiment with a quota U.S. voter sample (N = 354) showed that Russian nationality decreases source credibility perception in comparison to U.K. and control conditions, while the latter two showed no differences. Although skepticism in domestic media dampens such an effect, path analyses also showed that such impact can be extended to the effectiveness of an MNC’s (i.e., Huawei) global crisis communication efforts in the U.S. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

¹ An example of this policy can be seen in the Appendix of this article. In the article, the notice will be referred to as the “nationality tag”, but it has also been described as “funding disclaimers”, “state media warning labels”, etc.

² For both groups, around 24% of the respondents identified the messenger as “American”, suggesting that a considerable portion was not paying enough attention to the mimicked YouTube warning label on the experimental stimuli. Another possibility is that these audiences may have already watched CBS’ interview.

³ Sequential coding was chosen because the results of the ANCOVA test showed that there was no significant difference in the means of the control and U.K. conditions. Therefore, it is more meaningful to adopt sequential coding as the conditions are sequenced as control-Russia-U.K. at this point.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”[Grant Number 02600/310422111].