3 pages, Figure 1 above appeared on July 31, 2018, in Bloomberg. Bloomberg tweeted this graphic on August 13, and twenty-four hours later it had been retweeted by 84 twitter accounts and “liked” 118 times. Chances are you have seen this graphic on your social media newsfeed (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) by now. It is a novel idea to portray how U.S. land use could be represented across the United States. However, to the casual observer, which is most everyone viewing a graphic on social media, this graphic is misleading.
Garrett M. Steede (author), Courtney Meyers (author), Nan Li (author), Erica Irlbeck (author), Sherice Gearhart (author), and Texas Tech University; University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2018
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 149 Document Number: D10103
Article 4; pgs. 1-16, On January 1, 2017, the final rule of the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) was put into place requiring
antibiotics approved for both humans and animals to be discontinued for growth promotion. This change was
brought on by the role growth promoters in livestock production play in the development of antibiotic
resistance. Antibiotic resistance increases the costs associated with human health care by increasing the length
of stays in the hospital and requiring more intensive medical care for patients. The purpose of this study was to
explore sentiment and characteristics of social media content and the characteristics of the key influencers
whose opinions had the greatest amount of reach on social media in regard to antibiotic use in livestock and
antibiotic resistance. Nuvi, a social media monitoring program, provided sentiment for each tweet and coded
64.8% of the content (n = 129) as negative compared to 38.2% (n = 76) humans coded as negative. The
contrast between human coders and Nuvi indicates there could be discrepancies between how Nuvi codes
content and the way a human might interpret the content. No key influencer discussed antibiotic use in
livestock positively. Findings suggest agricultural communicators should not rely completely on the output
from sentiment analysis programs to evaluate how the public discusses issues related to agriculture,
particularly controversial issues. Further, agricultural communications practitioners should prioritize
monitoring the content shared by key influencers in an effort to better understand the content being shared by
the most influential users. Recommendations for future research are provided.
The article reports findings of a media-use survey conducted among agricultural communicators attending a meeting of the National Association of Farm Broadcasting. A majority of respondents reported using a variety of social media for work, with smartphones being the most common device used. Among other recommendations, authors suggested that respondents should continue to use Facebook and Twitter to engage their stakeholder groups in conversations about agriculture. The survey identified stakeholder groups of the communicator respondents.
