JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to the rapid evolution of the Internet and web 2.0 applications, for most people online sources have become one of the main channels to seek food risk information. Thus, it would be compelling to analyse online information sources’ coverage of food risks to understand which content online readers can be exposed to, possibly influencing their perceptions.

Objective:

Our aim was to understand which sources covered this theme the most and which topics received major attention in terms of coverage and engagement on social media.

Methods:

We perform an analysis of big data related to food risks by combining web monitoring techniques, content analysis and data visualisation of a large amount of unstructured text. Using a dictionary-based approach, a web monitoring application was instructed to automatically collect web content referring to the food risk and safety field. Data were retrieved from March 2017 to February 2018. The validated corpus (N=12,163) underwent automatic and manual content analysis. Results were combined with descriptive statistics extracted from Web-Live® and processed with Qlik Sense®.

Results:

Nutritional risks and news about outbreaks, controls and alerts were the most covered topics. Thematic sources devoted major attention to nutritional topics, whereas national sources covered food risks especially during food emergencies. Regarding engagement on social media, readers’ interest was higher for nutritional topics and animal welfare. Although traditional sources still publish a great amount of content, new mediators emerged as alternative sources for food risk information.

Conclusions:

This methodological approach resulted to be a useful mean to obtain an accurate characterisation of the online discourse on food risks and explained how the monitored sources contributed to the process of risk communication.