Corporate diplomacy in Indonesia's digital public sphere

This study explores how organisations navigate corporate diplomacy and maintain social legitimacy within the digital public sphere. In contemporary communication environments, online news media function not only as channels of information dissemination but also as arenas in which organisational legitimacy, trust, and public expectations are constructed and contested. From a public relations perspective, media sentiment provides a valuable analytical lens to understand how organisations navigate complex dynamics, particularly in the context of controversy and public scrutiny. The research is theoretically grounded in Corporate Diplomacy and Legitimacy Theory. Corporate diplomacy is understood as a strategic function through which organisations engage in continuous negotiation and relationship-building with diverse stakeholders in socio-political environments. Legitimacy theory, in turn, explains how organisations seek to align their actions with societal norms and expectations to maintain social approval. By integrating these perspectives, this study conceptualises online media sentiment as a relational indicator that reflects the alignment between organisational behaviour and public expectations. Utilising a computational communication research approach, the study analyses 1,000 online news articles published between 2010 and 2024, collected through web scraping from three Indonesian media outlets, detik.com, kompas.com, and tribunnews.com, covering three case studies: PT Bank Central Asia Tbk (BCA), the Djarum Foundation (PB Djarum), and PT Pupuk Indonesia. Sentiment was classified using a fine-tuned Indonesian sentiment classification model selected from among four candidates based on performance against a human-annotated gold standard of 300 articles, with inter-annotator agreement of Cohen’s kappa 0.63. The findings indicate that positive sentiment predominates across all three cases, with the magnitude and underlying mechanism of that positivity varying by case. In the case of BCA, positive sentiment is associated with innovation, digital services, and alignment with national development agendas, reflecting a proactive corporate diplomacy strategy that reinforces organisational legitimacy. Conversely, the PB Djarum case demonstrates how a discrete legitimacy challenge tied to child protection concerns can be identified and contained within an otherwise strongly positive media relationship built on athletic achievement. The case of Pupuk Indonesia highlights a contested sentiment profile, in which a substantial negative share linked to structural challenges in subsidised fertiliser distribution coexists with a plurality of positive coverage, indicating a persistent but partial legitimacy tension rather than a uniformly negative relationship. Furthermore, the study identifies the significant role of institutional actors as intermediaries in shaping public sentiment and organisational legitimacy. This finding suggests that media discourse is not solely a direct interaction between organisations and the public but is mediated by actors with high institutional credibility. The research contributes to the field of public relations by extending the understanding of corporate diplomacy in the digital era and by demonstrating the value of computational methods, combined with human validation, for longitudinal sentiment analysis. It argues that online media sentiment should be understood as a dynamic and strategic resource for managing stakeholder relationships and anticipating legitimacy challenges. In conclusion, the study highlights the need for organisations to adopt proactive and data-driven communication strategies to sustain legitimacy and effectively engage stakeholders in an increasingly complex digital environment.