Public Social Media Discussions on Agricultural Product Safety Incidents: Chinese African Swine Fever Debate on Weibo

Frontiers in Psychology

Ya Xue¹  Yibin Li²  Qian Jiang³  Yan Hu⁴ 

[1] Neijiang Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Neijiang, China;School of Economics and Management, Neijiang Normal University, Neijiang, China;School of Geography and Resource Science, Neijiang Normal University, Neijiang, China;Tuojiang River Basin High-Quality Development Research Center, Neijiang, China;

关键词: agricultural product safety incidents;    African swine fever;    social media;    information dissemination;    diffusion patterns;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.903760

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Public concern over major agricultural product safety incidents, such as swine flu and avian flu, can intensify financial losses in the livestock and poultry industries. Crawler technology were applied to reviewed the Weibo social media discussions on the African Swine Fever (ASF) incident in China that was reported on 3 August 2018, and used content analysis and network analysis to specifically examine the online public opinion network dissemination characteristics of verified individual users, institutional users and ordinary users. It was found that: (1) attention paid to topics related to “epidemic,” “treatment,” “effect” and “prevent” decrease in turn, with the interest in “prevent” increasing significantly when human infections were possible; (2) verified individual users were most concerned about epidemic prevention and control and play a supervisory role, the greatest concern of institutional users and ordinary users were issues related to agricultural industry and agricultural products price fluctuations respectively; (3) among institutional users, media was the main opinion leader, and among non-institutional users, elites from all walks of life, especially the food safety personnel acted as opinion leaders. Based on these findings, some policy suggestions are given: determine the nature of the risk to human health of the safety incident, stabilizing prices of relevant agricultural products, and giving play to the role of information dissemination of relevant institutions.

【 授权许可】

Unknown