Due to the increasing abundance of sources available online (news websites, blogs, social media, forums) for the public to use when looking for food-related information, this study explored how much these sources report about food risks and which topics received major attention and generated most engagement. To this extend, the web monitoring technique was used.
A system of keywords and rules (monitoring profile) was defined and used to instruct a web monitoring application to automatically monitor online sources and collect relevant contents. The monitoring profile referred to three main categories: biological and chemical risks, and nutritional aspects. All the mentions retrieved were validated by independent coders and successively grouped into broader coding categories in order to detect any dominant case going beyond the mentioning of specific risks. Data were retrieved from January to June 2017.
Among the sources who devoted attention to the topic, news websites and blogs are the ones who reached the highest number of visualizations, while social media (Facebook, Twitter) seem to be mainly digital environments where contents from news websites and blogs are shared and commented. Chemical risk (residues of the food supply chain and additives) received the major coverage in terms of both mentions and engagement, followed by nutritional aspects (diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and allergies) and biological risk (Salmonella, BSE, E.Coli and botulin). Pfas pollution and AMR were the two most important cases and gained the highest number of mentions. PFAS pollution, AMR, palm oil, withdrawals and seizures of foodstuffs in the European trade turned out to be ongoing themes in the online food risk discourse. PFAS pollution, CETA and nutrition related to heart attacks engaged readers at most.
Although web monitoring is a strong tradition especially for social media and corporate communication, this study represents a successful application of the technique to investigate communication extensively also on a broad field such as food risk.
Results can help risk communication practitioners to estimate how much information people can be exposed to and engage with, possibly becoming risk amplification stations. Moreover, communication interventions can be tailored according to online sources’ agenda and consumers’ interests.