James F. Evans Collection, Research directors at American land-grant universities are optimistic regarding the future of agricultural biotechnology and expect the ongoing "biotechnology revolution" to benefit the public, including consumers and farmers. Unresolved public policy questions involving biotechnology do concern many of the research administrators who responded to an opinion poll, but the prevailing attitude appears to be on of confident expectation that solutions will in time emerge for all outstanding biotech problems. Asked about "biotechnology's ethical questions," a majority of the respondents that U.S. land-grant institutions are well equipped to deal with such questions. The respondents said biotechnology may pose environmental risks, but they did not expect biological catastrophes to occur. They said biotechnology could be used to foster low-input methods of agricultural production, and they were in favor of pursuing biotech research that might improve agriculture's sustainability. (original)
28 pages., This study investigates how the emotional tone of food safety risk communication messages predicts message virality on social media. Through a professional Internet content tracking service, we gathered news articles written about the 2018 romaine lettuce recall published online between October 30th and November 29th, 2018. We retrieved the number of times each article was shared on Twitter and Pinterest, and the number of engagements (shares, likes, and comments) for each article on Facebook and Reddit. We randomly selected 10% of the articles (n = 377) and characterized the emotional tone of each article using machine learning, including emotional characteristics such as discrete emotions, emotional valence, arousal, and dominance. Conveying negative valence, low arousal, and high dominance, as well as anger and sadness emotions were associated with greater virality of articles on social media. Implications of these findings for risk communication in the age of social media are discussed.
28 pages, This study investigates how the emotional tone of food safety risk communication messages predicts message virality on social media. Through a professional Internet content tracking service, we gathered news articles written about the 2018 romaine lettuce recall published online between October 30th and November 29th, 2018. We retrieved the number of times each article was shared on Twitter and Pinterest, and the number of engagements (shares, likes, and comments) for each article on Facebook and Reddit. We randomly selected 10% of the articles (n = 377) and characterized the emotional tone of each article using machine learning, including emotional characteristics such as discrete emotions, emotional valence, arousal, and dominance. Conveying negative valence, low arousal, and high dominance, as well as anger and sadness emotions were associated with greater virality of articles on social media. Implications of these findings for risk communication in the age of social media are discussed.