Publikationsdatenbank

Twitter as a mirror of animal breeders protest in Poland in October 2020 (2021)

Art

Vortrag

Autoren

Jarynowski, Andrzej (WE 16)

Wójta-Kampa, Monika

Semenov, Alexander

Belik, Vitaly (WE 16)

Kongress

27. DACH-Epidemiologietagung

Bern, Schweiz, 01. – 03.09.2021

Quelle

27. DACH-Epidemiologietagung „Epidemiologie in der ökologischen Landwirtschaft“ : Gemeinsame Tagung des Forums für Epidemiologie und Tiergesundheit Schweiz der DVG-Fachgruppe „Epidemiologie und Dokumentation“ Institut für Öffentliches Veterinärwesen der Vetmeduni Wien in Verbindung mit der Vetsuisse Fakultät der Universität Bern : 1. bis 3. September 2021 — Wissenschaftliche Tagungsleitung: Ass. Prof. Salome Dürr, Prof. Gertraud Schüpbach, Veterinary Public Health Institut (Hrsg.)

Bern: Veterinary Public Health Institut, 2021 — S. 17

Sprache

Englisch

Verweise

URL (Volltext): http://dachepi.vphibern.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Tagungsband_DACH-Epidemiologietagung2021.pdf

Kontakt

Institut für Veterinär-Epidemiologie und Biometrie

Königsweg 67
14163 Berlin
+49 30 838 56034
epi@vetmed.fu-berlin.de

Abstract / Zusammenfassung

Aim: In September 2020, the governing party (Law and Justice) proposed the so-called "Five for Animals" which attempted to extend animal rights, but at the same time it impacted a number of sectors of Polish agriculture. Moreover, the feeling of abandonment (by the state) and powerlessness (for instance due to ongoing outbreaks of ASF and HPAI) and accumulated social tensions due to COVID-19 pandemic warmed up conflicts within various social groups of interest which led to protest distributed over 1000 locations across the country in October 2020 with biggest protests on 7th, 13th and 21st of October. We investigated different kinds of agents and topics in conflict between animal breeders and animal activists as well as journalists, public administration, politicians and veterinary services.
Material and Methods: We have collected 9 739 tweets from 1st to 31st October 2020 in Polish language with hashtag #ProtestRolników (farmers protest). We primarily applied Social Network Analysis (SNA) of the Internet media users connected via their tweets sharing activities. 2 812 users were engaged in discourse, while 2 595 retweeted or were retweeted at least once. Moreover, our investigation was extended by time series analysis as well as
NLP techniques such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling .
Results and Conclusions: Animal breeders protest communication has highly modular and hierarchical structure with clear boundaries between communities and opinion leaders. Antiprotest communities(25% of all users) constituted by 1) the mainstream opposition with representation of “green” and animal right defenders (12%); 2) Law and Justice supporters (13%). Pro-protest communities are constituted by: 1) farmers and agricultural organisations (26%); 2) right-wing and catholic organisations (16%); 3) protestants (6%); 4) the agricultural party PSL (6%). Tweeting activity concentrates around late mornings (the time after post sunrise grooming of animals). Very low coverage of tweets from Eastern Poland could suggest that Twitter is not popular there among farmers. Twitter in Poland has relatively low popularity in comparison to Facebook/Youtube (1.5 million active users which correspond to 5% of the literate population), however the analysis of commentary patterns on animal health breeders protest revealed a meaningful structure of the underlying social system, which is of great importance for veterinary epidemiology.