This study aims to investigate the role of social media in food safety risk
communication. Taking two major crisis events happened in 2016 in China, this
study adopted content analysis method to analyze the information related to
these two events and public use behavior on the “Sina Weibo”. In sum, 1303 posts
were analyzed; this study found that although risk communication in Weibo has
been proved highly interactive and make full use of multimedia, the application
of social media still has adverse respects such as unbalanced participation, single
information source, scarcity of science communication, vast negative emotion
expression and variety information quality. Furthermore, the findings shown that
due to the difference of the two events, the government presented different risk
management strategies, and resulting in differences between how public used
social media for risk communication. The study recommended future researches to
look into this phenomenon and provided suggestions for practice.