Can the social tensions (ecologists and animal breeders protests) propagate from East to West of Europe with ASF?
Creators: name: Jarynowski, Andrzej
name: Belik, Vitaly
name: Płatek, Daniel
name: Wójta-Kempa, Monika
name: Semenov, Alexander
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: ASF
social network annalysis
social media analytics

description: <strong>Background: Animal epizootics show a widely destructive effect on livestock production, but also cause tensions between various groups of interest. Pre-existing social conflicting matters of the animal production conditions has been manifested in reconfiguration of social relations by strengthening the tendency to issue farm animal protection in the general population (mostly urban) and "hijacking" profitability and cultural values of farmers. Such a structural configuration facilitates mobilisation of own groups of interest and ends up with conflict between animal breeders, far-right, agricultural parties, Christian organisations as well as opposing, government, pro-European opposition and ecological organisations. COVID-19 crisis and pressures on farmers related to economic and climate challenges cause more and more farmers to escape from animal production. Thus, changing and ending livestock production as well as deanimalization processes speed up in regions affected by ASF among others. The European Green Deal is projected to affect livestock production by decline between 5% and 15%, with the animal breeders income being the hardest hit among all farmers in the perspective of the next 10 years. </strong> <strong>A) Case study ecologists: Series of national-wide protests started January 2019 with protests against wild boar depopulation. In turn, in several Polish cities animal right defenders organised demonstrations against hunters and government plans of wild boars depopulation and as a way to slow down the spread of ASF. </strong> <strong>B) Case Study farmers. On the other hand, farmers call for significant reduction of the wild boar population. 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) led to protests distributed over 1000 locations across the country in October 2020. </strong> <strong>Methodology: We have collected 9739 tweets between 1-31.10.2020 in Polish language with hashtag #ProtestRolników (farmers protest) and 5285 retweets with #ASF language also in Polish from 19.12.2018 to 18.01.2019. We primarily applied Social Network Analysis (SNA) of the Internet media users connected via their tweets sharing activities. Moreover, our investigation was extended by time series analysis as well as NLP techniques such as sentiment analysis and keyword analysis. </strong> <strong>Results and Conclusions: </strong> <strong>A) Ecological protests have been massively discussed by mainstream media and the general population constitute a general component linked closely to ecological activists clusters.</strong> <strong>B) Animal breeders' protest communication has a highly modular and hierarchical structure with farmers as a general component, but with clear boundaries between internet communities and opinion leaders. There was only a small presence of the general public (i.e. mainstream media) in the discourse. Tweeting activity concentrates around late mornings (the time after post sunrise grooming of animals).</strong> <strong>Level of optimism (text sentiment) among farmers protesters than animal right defender protesters was significantly higher than - probably due to a feeling of unity. Level of verbal aggression is opposite, which suggests that language repertoires differ.</strong>
description: This research was partly supported by PNFN (The Polish-German Foundation for Science) 2019-21