  The Covid-19 pandemic caused disruptive effects for individuals, firms, and
societies. In this paper, we offer insights on the major issues and challenges
firms are facing in the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as their concerns for
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) themes. To do so, we investigate large
Italian firms' discussion on Twitter in the first nine months of the pandemic.
We downloaded all Twitter posts from 1st of March, 2020, to 17th of November,
2020 by the accounts of the largest Italian firms, i.e. those with 250 or more
employees. We then built the bipartite network of accounts and hashtags and,
using an entropy-based null model as a benchmark, we projected the information
contained in the network into the accounts layers, identifying a network of
accounts in which a link indicates a non trivial similarity in terms of their
usage of hashtags. We find that the conversation is focused around 13
communities, 10 of which include Covid-19 themes. The core of the network is
formed of 5 communities, which deal with environmental sustainability, digital
innovation and safety. Firms' ownership type does not seem to influence the
conversation. 10 communities out of 13 mention hashtags related to CSR, with
the environmental and social dimensions as the prevalent ones. Interestingly
enough, the social dimension seems more relevant in the communities dealing
with digital innovation and safety. However, the relevance of CSR hashtags is
very small at the single message level, but with some peculiarities arising in
specific communities. Overall, our paper highlights the role of network methods
on Twitter data as a tool which can support managers and policy makers to
design their strategies and decision making, capturing firms' emerging issues
and relevant themes.
