In 2008, beef and pork in Ireland was contaminated with Dioxin, leading to an international recall of Irish meat products. Investigations revealed that animal feed had been polluted with the toxic chemical Dioxin which then accumulated in pork, reaching 200 times the EU recommended limit. Beef contamination was less severe and therefore not recalled. The crisis was a huge blow to the Irish meat industry where around 50% of pork products are exported internationally, for example, to the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and non-EU countries such as South Africa, China and Japan.
FoodRisC investigated reporting of the crisis in order to understand how different traditional and social media tools were used, and by whom, to communicate. The researchers analysed the key themes of the media records, the source of information, the reporter’s tone of voice and the topic of the message communicated. They also compared and contrasted the role of influence and influencers in traditional and social media situations, aiming to identify influencers within social media and the size of the “outreach networks”.
Influence has been a well-researched subject for a considerable period of time, although much of this research pre-dates the rapid rise of social media. FoodRisC considered the factors that indicate ‘influence’ in social media platforms to identify the most influential social media reporters in each platform. For Twitter these included the number of re-tweets and followers; for forums and blogs, the number of comments and for Facebook, the number of likes and fans. The content of their messages was analysed to identify how these ‘influentials’, who have the power to shape public opinion, were reporting on the 2008 Irish dioxin crisis.