Naming, Praising, and Shaming Firms: Online Activism and the Russo-Ukrainian War

After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine beginning February 2022, activists worldwide undertook to influence multinational corporations (MNCs) to exit Russia. This setting offers the opportunity to study data-generating processes driving social backlash to foreign investment. To do so, we compile 10 pro-Ukraine "name-praise-shame" lists that circulated online in the aftermath of the invasion, and we match names to a novel database of over 40,000 MNC subsidiaries that were present in pre-invasion Russia (Wellhausen and Zhu, Forthcoming). As of 8 months post-invasion, 16.3% were matched to lists. We confirm that activists are more likely to target highly visible firms and those whose continued investment would conflict with home state politics, whereas relevance to the Russian war effort is not a meaningful determinant. Moreover, we demonstrate consistency in determinants of selection on two pro-Russia lists that emerged as backlash-to-backlash. We find notable consistencies in determinants of praising versus shaming firms, and notable inconsistencies in selection of firms engaging in "roundtripped" rather than conventional FDI. This article contributes to a growing literature on non-state pressure on global business and points to the possibilities and limits of targeting FDI.