“Stop Blaming the Cows!”: How Livestock Production is Legitimized in Everyday Discourse on Facebook

ABSTRACT

In 2016, Swedish climate reporting declined in quantity and shifted focus somewhat from climate change as such to the harmful climate impacts of meat consumption. The latter prompted discussions in social media—an increasingly important forum for public debate but infrequently studied in environmental communication research. Despite strong evidence that a meat and dairy-based diet is harmful for the environment, meat consumption is increasing, and this qualitative study aims to—through the lens of social representation theory—contribute knowledge about how livestock production is legitimized in everyday discourse on Facebook. The article identifies representations that legitimize livestock production through polarization between (1) livestock production and other (environmental) issues, (2) environmentally “good” and “bad” countries, and (3) “reliable” and “unreliable” information. It concludes by discussing the influence of national ideology on the legitimization of livestock production and the potential of social media to counter the post-politicization of environmental issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• environmental communication
• social representation theory
• climate change
• meat
• lay sense-making

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ulrika Olausson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1011-7726

Notes

1. One was an Op-Ed article and the other was a report on that article.

2. Discursive strategies should here be interpreted as “forms of (discursive) manipulation of ‘reality’ by social actors in order to achieve a certain goal. … The intervention and its aim can be more or less consciously pursued” (Carvalho, 2005, p. 3).

3. Facebook comments were translated from Swedish by a professional translator.

4. The title of this article derives from this quote.

5. The song “Öppna Landskap” was written by Ulf Lundell.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas [grant number FR-2016/0005].