Greenpeace cyberadvocacy: message strategies and the framing of the "say no to genetic engineering" campaign

This study focuses on Greenpeace International’s cyberadvocacy against genetic engineering (GE), an issue that threatens to remain contentious for a long time to come. How GE was framed by Greenpeace in two countries with different policy stances toward GE – Australia (which is precautionary) and Philippines (which is generally permissive) – was also compared. Content analysis was used to examine four message characteristics (objectives, arguments, appeals and proportion of text to visuals) of Greenpeace’s anti-GE website and the framing of genetic engineering in news articles and press releases published in websites dedicated to the two countries. It was found that most of Greenpeace’s website pages were meant to create awareness and encourage information seeking among its identified target audiences. Logos argumentation was employed by citing statistics and using logical reasoning. For the most part, the pages highlighted the risks of genetic engineering by means of negative appeals. Nearly all pages allocated one visual per article. Considering these message characteristics, it can be inferred that Greenpeace International targets its GE messages toward latent and aware publics, and applied message strategies pertinent to these audience segments. A content analysis of websites dedicated to Australia and the Philippines showed spikes in news items published that preceded the approval of the commercial release of genetically modified crops: GE canola in Australia (2003), Bt corn (2002) and Bayer rice (2007) in the Philippines. In both countries, biotechnology policy was the most dominant frame that structured the articles, however, a closer examination of the frames showed the use of specific generic frames culled from GE literature, suggesting that Greenpeace does not blindly employ a hodgepodge of frames. It latches on to a few and exploits these frames to explain its advocated position. The Philippines also used significantly more frames and sources in longer articles with Greenpeace representatives or spokespersons cited first.