"Crayfish is really a bug shrimp", "Seedless grapes are covered with birth control pills" and "Eating large-scale chicken can infect bird flu" … … The rapid development of the Internet, while bringing convenience to people, is also easy to make rumors spread like wildfire. Statistics show that "rumors on the tip of the tongue" account for 45% of online rumors, and the food safety field has become the hardest hit by online rumors.
On April 17th, the State Food and Drug Administration held a briefing, inviting the heads of relevant departments, experts and scholars, and employees of Internet platforms such as Tencent and Sina, from the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Health Planning Commission, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the National Network Information Office, Tsinghua University and China Academy of Social Sciences, to have a discussion on how to effectively control food rumors through multi-party linkage. Yan Jiangying, spokesperson of the Food and Drug Administration, said that it is necessary to increase the punishment and accountability of food safety rumor makers, improve public scientific literacy, and make rumors nowhere to hide.
Rumors are refurbished and confuse the audience.
According to Yan Jiangying’s analysis, food safety rumors have four characteristics:
Deliberately fabricated, with ulterior motives. The rumormongers disregard the facts, fabricate the so-called truth out of thin air, and even direct and perform themselves, and concoct "evidence" such as pictures and videos to seek illegitimate interests. For example, in February this year, several videos showing "plastic laver" were widely spread on the Internet. In the video, some people said that laver produced by several enterprises in Jinjiang, Fujian Province was "made of plastic" and said that laver was chewy, urging netizens to "stop eating", which triggered a round of "plastic laver" storm.
Steal the concept and confuse the audience. Rumor makers use exaggerated and distorted processing methods to blur the truth and the whole picture, and frequently use irritating language such as "toxic", "carcinogenic" and "lethal" to fool the public’s cognition. Because such rumors are "mixed with the truth", it is difficult to identify and obtain evidence, and it is difficult to refute rumors.
Old news is stirred up and deliberately discredited. With the food and drug safety incident as the background, the rumormonger has completely changed what happened in the past; Change the date of new bottles of old wine; The date is blurred or deleted in disguise, so as to achieve the purpose of forwarding each other and misleading people’s consumption.
Joke and ridicule, negative communication. The rumor mongers dub the film and television clips, make jokes and ridicule pictures and videos, and use the characteristics of the Internet that young people are the main group and young audiences are curious, forming a fission spread, and the follow-up effect will be difficult to eliminate for a long time.
Disturb consumption judgment and damage the development of the industry
"Today, with the high popularity of the Internet, online food safety rumors disturb social trust, weaken the credibility of the government, affect public confidence in food safety, and pose a threat to social harmony and stability." Yan Jiangying said that in recent years, people have been extremely vigilant about the "lessons from the past" of problem foods, and they have tightened their nerves at the slightest sign of trouble. Once food-related rumors appear on the Internet, people’s anxiety and sensitive nerves are immediately touched, and rumors will quickly ferment, which will further disrupt people’s consumption judgments and damage the development of the industry. For example, a rumor of "plastic laver" may cause a loss of nearly 100 million yuan to the laver industry in Jinjiang, Fujian and other places.
"From the perspective of communicators, some rumor communicators have obvious interests, and there are many motives such as economic extortion, public opinion and business wars, and eye games." Su Jing, deputy director of Tsinghua University Institute of Health Communication, said that the circle of friends on WeChat has become the main position of rumor spreading, and WeChat mini-videos, articles from the media in WeChat official account and WeChat short messages are the main forms of rumor spreading. Some food safety rumors are often spread by means of video, lacking basic elements such as time, place and people. Some food safety rumors use people’s fear appeals and moral kidnapping to emphasize the serious consequences, and use inflammatory words, such as "emergency" and "shock", which have strong impact.
Governance should make heavy punches and increase illegal costs.
Yan Jiangying said that to control food safety rumors, it is necessary to make a heavy blow, and all sectors of society need to participate together to establish a long-term mechanism for multi-social subjects to jointly control rumors, so that government departments, professionals, related enterprises, news media and the public can form a joint force.
In recent years, the Food and Drug Administration has upgraded and revised its website, adding a column of "popular science knowledge" and a "rumor platform", which has become an important platform for all sectors to obtain food and drug safety supervision information. The column of "Verification" of People’s Daily has also published investigation reports for many times, and scientifically verified the food safety rumors such as "plastic laver", "seedless grape smearing contraceptives", "eating strawberries causes cancer" and "crayfish is a bug shrimp" for the first time, and quickly dispelled the rumors, eliminating public misunderstanding and panic.
"There are many online food rumors and spread quickly. One of the important reasons is that the illegal cost is low." Jong Li, a researcher at the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that China’s food safety law clearly stipulates that no unit or individual may fabricate or disseminate false food safety information, and set corresponding penalties for offenders. "In the future, it is necessary to further increase the punishment for illegal acts, especially for hell to pay, a bad act of spreading food safety rumors through the Internet to disrupt market order and profit from it, and improve the law enforcement shock."
Zhao Huajun, Emergency Department of Agricultural Products Quality and Safety Supervision Bureau of the Ministry of Agriculture, believes that it is very important to improve the public’s scientific literacy of food safety, which is essential to prevent rumors from "goodwill".
Yan Jiangying said that in the next step, the State Food and Drug Administration plans to establish a "green channel for food and drug safety rumors" in cooperation with the Central Network Information Office, and control the key nodes of rumor dissemination at the first time, and at the same time unite major news units, new media and well-known popular science organizations to establish a "food and drug safety popular science communication alliance" to promptly rumor and release authoritative information in a timely manner.