Hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency: social media affordances and the governance of farm animal protection

Abstract

The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.

The virtual good farmer: Farmers’ use of social media and the (re)presentation of “good farming”

“…The evidence presented here shows the (often subtle) regional variations in what is seen as good farming—whereby contextual factors relating to geographical and physical differences, as well as social and economic constraints of particular farms, lead to variations in the taste of necessity and hence in what is seen as good or desirable practice. Whilst the findings presented here echo those of previous research which has observed the potential of social media to aid information flow and collective action online (Rodak, 2020), it extends upon these in showing how it might, through facilitating ‘continual exchange’ (Bourdieu, 1986), and the process of ‘dramaturgical cooperation’ (Goffman, 1959) be used to develop capital online—both through allowing connections to wider groups, allowing particular scripts of farming to be reaffirmed and through augmenting existing offline relationships.…”

“…Whilst there is an emerging literature beyond rural studies which has begun to consider social media as a way through which individuals represent themselves and their lives (DeVito et al., 2017), there remains a gap in applying this consideration to farmers’ use of social media. More instrumental considerations of social media have appeared in studies which explore the role that it might play as an extension of more traditional forms of information dissemination relating to agricultural education, marketing and extension activities (Kaushik et al., 2018), showcasing new innovations and technologies to farmers (Chowdhury & Odame, 2013), considering how user generated data from social media analysis might inform policy and practice (Panagiotopoulos et al., 2017), and how social media might offer opportunities for self‐organization in relation agricultural governance and wider political issues (Rodak, 2020). This work recognises the multiple affordances that such technologies offer including visibility (the ability to make visible knowledge, activities and behaviours which may previously have been unseen), persistence (the ability for content to remain after initial posting), editability (the ability to edit and change posts before and after posting) and association (the ability to connect with other content and users through processes such as tagging) (Frison & Eggermont, 2015).…”

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

“…The scholarship on the sustainability of agri-food systems has also addressed several ethical issues [293][294][295][296][297][298][299][300], such as animal welfare [55,294,301,302] or those relating to the use of biotechnologies [303]. Allievi et al [293] went even farther and made a strong case for considering "ethics" as the fourth dimension of sustainability.…”

“…This focus on participation led to the emergence of different participatory approaches that do not only cover the whole food chain (from production to consumption), but also associated activities such as participatory research [290,[402][403][404][405], participatory breeding [307,406], and participatory certification [407,408]. Besides participation and inclusiveness, accountability [409,410] and transparency [301,411,412] are central in the new governance arrangements for sustainable agri-food systems.…”

Fellow cows and conflicting farmers: Public perceptions of dairy farming uncovered through frame analysis

“…It is almost 60 years since Ruth Harrison first brought concerns about increasingly intensive farming methods and their impact on the farm animals involved to public attention through her seminal work Animal Machines ( 1 ). Despite this, the farming industry and external audiences continue to diverge over how farm animals should be kept ( 2 ), with public dissatisfaction about current methods expressed through a range of vehicles including survey results ( 3 , 4 ), online campaigns ( 5 , 6 ), government policy ( 7 , 8 ), and product development ( 9 , 10 ). However, there is evidence that farmers and veterinarians dismiss such concerns on grounds of the public being uninformed about farming ( 11 – 14 ), unaware of the realities of livestock production ( 15 , 16 ), influenced by animal rights advocates ( 11 , 12 , 17 ), prone to anthropomorphism ( 11 ), or naïve about the economic impacts of changing practices ( 18 ).…”