Critical pr in food communication and social media. The case of european food safety and promotion authorities

Identifier:  TDX:1988

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1988

Authors:  Lozano Monterrubio, Natàlia

Abstract:
The popularity of social media has encouraged public health authorities to interact online with citizens. The aim of the current thesis is to gain insight from the critical public relations theories perspective about to what extend social media strategies can assist European food safety and promotion authorities to communicate their discourses to lay consumers and strength relationships with them. The research has conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with food information supplier experts of five different European countries (Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands and Spain) to observe their point of view in relation to the adoption of social media into their communicative strategies. The study has been completed with an online content analysis of all the websites and social media platforms of the official food safety and promotion agencies of the 28 European member states. The research concludes that food authorities have adopted social media strategies from a technical perspective and today they still lack appropriate communicative structures and cultures in favour of negotiation of meanings among creative audiences. This thesis has been partly developed within the collaborative FoodRisC project which was funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (grant agreement no. 245124).