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

Abstract

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.

Behavioral decision-making of government, agricultural product producers, and consumers on agricultural product quality and safety regulation in a digital environment

“…With the continuous progress of science and technology and the popularization of information technology, digital technology has brought new opportunities for supervising agricultural quality and safety ( 5 ), such as real-time monitoring and collection of agricultural product quality data, and agricultural product quality traceability based on blockchain. However, there have been frequent incidents of quality and safety of all kinds of agricultural products ( 6 , 7 ), such as the “stale grain” incident, the “Sudan red incident” ( 8 ), the “malachite green incident,” the “artificial honey” incident in Wuhan, Hubei, and other places, and so on. These events have exposed that digital traceability technology has not been effectively used in the supervision of agricultural product quality and safety, and how to apply digital technology to the supervision of agricultural product quality and safety has become an urgent problem to be solved ( 9 ).…”