Food Safety Risk Communication Behavior on Social Media: The Case of Sina Weibo

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the role of social media in food safety risk communication. Taking two major crisis events happened in 2016 in China, this study adopted content analysis method to analyze the information related to these two events and public use behavior on the “Sina Weibo.” In sum, 1,303 posts were analyzed; this study found that although risk communication in Weibo has been proved highly interactive and make full use of multimedia, the application of social media still has adverse respects such as unbalanced participation, single information source, scarcity of science communication, vast negative emotion expression and variety information quality. Furthermore, the findings shown that due to the difference of the two events, the government presented different risk management strategies, and resulting in differences between how public used social media for risk communication. The study recommended future researches to look into this phenomenon and provided suggestions for practice. (Article content in Chinese with English extended abstract)

Keywords

• social media
• risk communication
• food safety
• content analysis
• microblog