A Simultaneous Text Analysis of Twitter and Newspaper Articles

— A Case Study on the Food Camouflage Problem —

Abstract

　Food production management is something that must be done thoroughly. However, cases involving threats to the safety of consumers have frequently occurred in recent years. In this paper, we simultaneously analyze Twitter messages and newspaper articles regarding the food camouflage problem that occurred at a luxury hotel in Japan in the autumn of 2013. Food camouflage means to disguise food ingredients and growing district of them in order to deceive consumers. The purpose of this study is to clarify how Twitter users and newspaper companies responded to this problem. As a result, we found that many tweets criticized a large supermarket company and the reporting bias of the mass media, but newspaper companies rarely reported on this problem of the large supermarket company. This could verify that misinformation has been widely spread especially on Twitter.