Hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency: social media affordances and the governance of farm animal protection

Olga Rodak

doi:10.1007/s10460-019-09984-5

Abstract

The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.

Highlights

The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance (Jessop 1995; Stoker 1998), a process that involves going beyond the model of state management of public issues towards growing participation of non-state actors, which leads to the emergence of heterogeneous governance networks (Klijn 2008)
The analysis reveals how a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms
As I was interested in the strategic adoption of social media functionalities, I focused my analysis on the publications emerging around the campaign, which goal, among others, was to mobilise participants to enact technology in a particular way

Summary

Introduction

The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance (Jessop 1995; Stoker 1998), a process that involves going beyond the model of state management of public issues towards growing participation of non-state actors, which leads to the emergence of heterogeneous governance networks (Klijn 2008). They claim, affordances emerge out of the interaction between particular functionalities and social actors, with their specific goals, technical capacities, and social structures in which they are embedded Employing such a tool allows me to develop the discussion on the governance of farm animal protection and the impact of social media on the governance of agro-food sustainability by highlighting two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities: hashtag hijacking by animal rights activists and crowdsourcing transparency by the British dairy industry. Vegan activism takes the form of “commodity activism” of promoting plant-based products and delegitimising the products of livestock agriculture, and by that constituting a direct existential threat to the dairy industry (McCrow-Young 2014) From their very beginning, media technologies played a vital role in the governance of the agro-food domain. Affordances are “both functional ... and relational” (Faraj and Azad 2012, p. 253), as material functionalities allow or constrain particular kinds of action, but users may appropriate the same functionalities of the system differently

Methods

Findings

Conclusions and further research