Many organizations struggle to meaningfully engage with their stakeholders on political, societal and environmental topics via social media. Often such discourses unravel into splintered and negative conversations, raising the question whether organizations can and should exercise some level of control and ‘steering’ in these conversations and, if so, how stakeholders would react to such ‘top down’ moderation. Existing studies lack empirical insights into the impacts of different levels of moderation in social media conversations on stakeholder attitudes. Two experimental studies were developed to test the effect of different levels of organizational moderation on stakeholder attitudes towards organizations. We show that increased levels of moderation negatively affect attitudes towards an organization, satisfaction with an organization's performance, and trust in the organization. Increased moderation also significantly undermines beliefs in the commitment of the organization to its stakeholders and control mutuality. This paper extends recent qualitative attempts to build new theory around stakeholder dialogues on social media by testing the effects of varying levels of moderation in such dialogues.

许多组织努力通过社交媒体与利益相关者就政治，社会和环境话题进行有意义的互动。这些话语通常会散布成零散的消极对话，从而引发问题：组织是否可以并且应该在这些对话中行使一定程度的控制和“指导”，如果是的话，利益相关者将如何应对这种“自上而下”的节制。现有研究缺乏对社交媒体对话中不同程度的节制对利益相关者态度的影响的经验性见解。开展了两项实验研究，以测试不同级别的组织适度对利益相关者对组织态度的影响。我们表明，节制程度的提高对组​​织的态度，组织的满意度产生负面影响 的表现，以及对组织的信任。适度的提高也大大破坏了人们对组织对利益相关者的承诺并控制相互关系的信念。本文通过测试社交对话中不同程度的节制的影响，扩展了最近的定性尝试，以围绕社交媒体上的利益相关者对话建立新的理论。