Digital voices, greener choices: How online public environmental appeals reshape corporate ESG performance

This study examines how online public environmental appeals (PEA) influence corporate ESG performance and explores the role of government environmental protection efforts in shaping this relationship. Drawing on the data from People’s Daily local leadership message board (2012–2022), we employed latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to extract ecological governance themes from online discussions and text mining techniques to evaluate the intensity of online and offline linkage supervision (OOLS) by local governments. Using a panel dataset of A-share listed manufacturing firms in China, our findings show that online PEA are positively associated with corporate ESG performance. OOLS directly improves corporate ESG performance and further strengthens the positive association between online PEA and corporate ESG performance. Government environment protection investment (GEPI) also has a direct positive effect on ESG performance, but it weakens the marginal impact of online PEA, suggesting a substitution effect between government-led environmental investment and public scrutiny. These results highlight the complex interplay between public participation and government intervention in corporate sustainability. The study offers policy insights on balancing regulatory oversight with public engagement to optimize environmental governance in the digital era.