Impact Of Food Safety Internet Rumors On Consumers’ Food Purchasing Decisions

In recent years,the frequency of major food safety incidents is low,the level of government food safety governance has been greatly improved,and the construction and improvement of a strict and efficient,socially co-managed food safety governance system is being accelerated.However,the task of managing food safety risks in this new era remains daunting.Food safety rumors spread widely in the social media have become a social phenomenon that has received widespread public attention,making food safety risks even more insidious and unpredictable.The far-reaching effects of past food safety incidents and the serious harm they caused to the public have also resulted in a more sensitive public,which has provided the social conditions for the spread of food safety internet rumors.With repackaging and malicious adaptation,food risk information can easily evolve into food safety internet rumors that spread rapidly in social media.This is not only related to the healthy development of the food industry and consumer market,but even aggravates mistrust at the social level and creates a crisis of confidence in government regulation.Based on this,this paper develops from the perspective of the Protection Motivation Theory,which argues that public concern about food safety internet rumors is a protection motive arising from the threat of risk to individuals,i.e.,the prerequisite willingness of individuals to adopt protection behavior.Through empirical studies,we analyze the relevant risk perception factors affecting the concern about food safety internet rumors and examine the important reasons for the widespread concern about food safety internet rumors.The study then advances to examine consumers’ subsequent purchase decisions as protective behaviors,exploring the impact of food safety Internet rumor information and disinformation on consumers’ panic psychology,and further exploring the mechanisms underlying consumers’ three purchase decisions of consumption shifting,consumption change,and consumption retention.From the perspective of Protection Motivation Theory,this paper first explores the reasons why food safety internet rumors have attracted public attention as food safety risk factors that are widely spread in the network and pose a serious threat to public health and social stability.Taking the food safety rumor debunking information in China Food Food Debunking Network,Rumor Filter and Tencent News True Platform and the corresponding food safety network rumor text data account as the research object,the risk perception factors affecting the attention of food safety internet rumor text are summarized by using relevant theories and an index system is constructed,and the text content of We Chat food safety network rumor text is quantified by using the index system,and the cumulative number of reading and comments of various rumors is taken as the dependent variable to establish a hypothetical model for regression analysis.The results showed that the relevance of reality,the severity of consequences,and the expression mode in the text had a positive impact on the reading and comment volume of food safety network rumors,while emotional mobilization had a positive impact on the reading volume of rumors,the impact on the number of comments on rumors was not significant,and the effect of specificity on the number of reading and comments was not significant.Secondly,based on the Push-Pull-Mooring Migration Theory,the influence of food safety network rumor information and debunking information on consumers’ panic psychology and purchase decision is investigated.On the basis of considering the risk coefficient of food safety internet rumor information,the attractiveness of alternative food,the conversion cost,consumption habits,and the food safety knowledge of netizens,MATLAB software is used to simulate and study the rumor information and debunking information to cause public panic,which in turn leads to the change of consumers’ food purchase decisions.The results show that the proportion of nodes with rumor information,the risk coefficient of rumor information,the proportion of nodes with rumor refuting information at the initial release,the quality of rumor refuting information,the timeliness of rumor refuting information,the level of food safety knowledge of netizens,and mooring factors will change the public’s panic and purchase decision to varying degrees,while the attractiveness of alternative food has no obvious impact on public panic psychology and purchase decision.This provides theoretical support for the supervision and guidance of food safety network public opinion and the regulation and stability of food market order.