Affiliation:
1. School of Accounting Southwestern University of Finance and Economics Chengdu China
2. McCombs School of Business University of Texas at Austin Austin Texas USA
3. Desautels Faculty of Management McGill University Montreal Quebec Canada
Abstract
AbstractInvestment‐related social media platforms are transforming the traditional intermediary landscape by rapidly disseminating user‐empowered opinions and recommendations, raising concerns about the credibility of information on such platforms. We examine the differential content verifiability of SeekingAlpha.com articles with sell recommendations (short articles) versus articles with buy recommendations (long articles). We find that short articles contain greater verifiable content than long articles, and verifiable content in short articles generates greater market reactions and better mitigates return reversals than that in long articles. This asymmetry contrasts prior research evidence that greater content verifiability accompanies traditional sell‐side analyst reports with buy recommendations. Our results are robust to various confounding factors, including author effects, among others. Our results become more pronounced in the presence of greater retail ownership. Taken together, our results provide new evidence on investors’ assessment of the credibility of information on social media platforms.