A social network analysis of the use of social media to promote agriculture to indonesian youth

Abstract

Farmer regeneration remains a big challenge for Indonesia to address food insecurity and promote sustainable agricultural development. With the issue of aging farmers, youth have the potential to become agents of change for the development of agriculture and support the Industrial Revolution 4.0. Nevertheless, young people have less willingness to participate in agriculture. Instead, they prefer working in off-farm employment. It is expected that social media such as Facebook and Instagram can be great tools to promote youth to agriculture. Through social network analysis, this research aims at describing the topics discussed by communities in Instagram and Facebook, representing influential actors, and evaluating the effectiveness of social media in engaging young people in the networks. ScrapeStorm was utilized to scrape posts on Instagram and Facebook with a total of 18,866 and 6,566 posts, respectively. Analyzed through Gephi using Open Ord and Force Atlas 2 algorithms, this study found emerged themes in Instagram network and Facebook related to agricultural production and movement, agribusiness development, sustainable and scientific farming, youth encouragement, and resources needed by youth. The Ministry of Agriculture and Pastal Farm are influential actors in the network that actively advocate for young people to work in agriculture. Finally, Instagram was found to form a more cohesive network of young people. This study contributes to the literature regarding the use of social media to increase youth participation in agriculture through user-generated data and for policymakers, government, and stakeholders to design more effective ways to increase youth participation in the sector. Keywords: Youth, social network analysis, youth participation, agriculture, farmer regeneration.