Curbing Negativity: Influence of Providing Justifications About Control Over User-Generated Comments on Social Media

Social media present prime opportunities for commercial brands to promote their products. Some user-generated comments, however, hamper brands’ promotion efforts with fake claims. The literature on warranting theory suggests that if a company controls the dissemination of user-generated comments of its products, it may backfire against the company by reducing the warranting value of favorable comments. The current study proposes that a company’s justification for their information control behavior can restore the warranting value of user-generated comments. Drawing upon the literature on fairness theory and mindlessness, the study investigated the effectiveness of two types of justifications varying in their legitimacy. Results from a web-based experiment (N = 221) with four conditions (no evidence of dissemination control vs. no justification vs. placebic justification vs. real justification) confirm that when a company offers a legitimate justification for deleting users’ comments, it mitigates negative evaluations that may result from the company’s information control behavior.