Studies of plant-based diets and social media
Montalbano & Anderson, (2021) analysed 1 year of Twitter data (February 2019 to March 2020) and found that:
- tweets about veganism were far more frequent than any other kind of posts, and
- Far more posts about diet than welfare, advocacy or cultvated meat.
- The 2019 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that recommended meat reduction showed up in the data
- Vegan terms were more negative than plant based ones except Veganuary
- Vegan is slightly less positively talked about than most diets except Keto where its the same, paleo, non-GMO, organic and mediterranean diet all rated more positively.
- tweets mentioning animal rights or animal liberation were most frequently negative in tone whereas effective animal advo was more positive. Probably because animal rights/liberation people are angrier
Hasimoto et al., (2024) analysed Tweets about meat alternatives in English and Japanese from 2006-2021. Similarly to us, they analysed how often specific words co-occured with terms for plant based meat and how it changed over time.
- Eckert et al., 2024 analysed nearly 5000 comments on 9 articles on Canadian facebook across 2019 and 2020. They found key themes such as affordability of food, distrust of government and food corporations, personal choice, standard stuff.
- Shamoi et al., 2022