Veganuary and the vegan sausage (t)rolls: conflict and commercial engagement in online climate-diet discourse

Mary Sanford; Jamie Lorimer

doi:10.1057/s41599-022-01464-2

Veganuary and the vegan sausage (t)rolls: conflict and commercial engagement in online climate-diet discourse

Mary Sanford, Jamie Lorimer

University of Oxford

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

Social media platforms have become critical venues for a wide spectrum of influence campaigns, from activism to advertising. Sometimes these two ends overlap and it remains unknown how the latter might impact the former. Situated within contemporary scholarship on vegan activism, this work examines corporate involvement with the Veganuary 2019 campaign on Twitter, as well as the antagonistic backlash it received. We find that the activists and commercial entities engage mostly separate audiences, suggesting that commercial campaigns do little to drive interactions with Veganuary activism. We also discover strong threads of antagonism reflecting the “culture wars" surrounding discussions of veganism and climate-diet science. These findings inform our understanding of the challenges facing climate-diet discourses on social media and motivate further research into the role of commercial agents in online activism.

Original language	English
Article number	455
Journal	Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Volume	9
Early online date	19 Dec 2022
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01464-2
Publication status	Published - 19 Dec 2022
Externally published	Yes

Data Availability Statement

Per the stipulations of the ethical review, the Twitter data itself cannot be made public because it contains information, which could be used to identify individuals who are not public figures. The data can be made available upon request for academic research purposes.

Acknowledgements

Dr. Barath Ganesh collected and provided the dataset as part of a collaboration with the Livestock, Environment, and People (LEAP) program at the Oxford Martin School. Dr Matteo Bruno wrote the bicm package used for the projection analysis and offered his assistance during the coding stages of the project. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose feedback was instrumental in shaping the final work, along with Greg Taylor, Renaud Lambiotte, Taha Yasseri, James Painter, Francesco Grossetti, Federico Danieli, and Alex Sexton for their guidance and advice throughout preparation of the manuscript. The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Our Planet Our Health (Livestock, Environment and People-LEAP) award number 205212/Z/16/Z and by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council’s Grand Union Doctoral Training Program, grant number 2262660.

Funding

This research was supported by UKRI ESRC Grand Union Doctoral Training Program and open-access publishing support from the University of Oxford.

Access to Document

10.1057/s41599-022-01464-2Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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Veganuary and the vegan sausage (t)rolls: conflict and commercial engagement in online climate-diet discourse

Abstract

Data Availability Statement

Acknowledgements

Funding

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