May and Sima worked together to measure the relationship between select geographical locations in the UK and attitudes toward plant-based foods. Specifically, this meant capturing tweets with key hashtags (e.g. ‘plant-based’ and ‘vegan’) from Twitter users in London, Manchester and Preston during ‘Veganuary 2019’. processing and sentiment analysis to capture the general balance of positive, negative and neutral terms within the text of each tweet. Usefully, the selected time period captured a lot of Twitter discussion about Greggs’ new vegan sausage roll, including Piers Morgan’s derisive reaction to it and many peoples’ scathing reactions to him.
May and Sima’s work showed that many more people in cambodia rcs data London tweeted about plant-based diets and foods than did people in Manchester or Preston. This is not entirely surprising, given the population differences between the chosen locations. More interestingly, both London and Manchester showed a neutral-to mildly positive overall sentiment while Preston showed only a mostly neutral average sentiment. Their results suggest that most people in diverse contexts are at least neutral if not mildly positive about a “controversial” topic on a “divisive” platform. More research might tease out whether the differences relate to population density, northernliness, or something else. Scraping Veganuary 2019 tweets from Newcastle or Glasgow, for example, might help tease apart the patterns more.