How are Instagram and TikTok used to promote veganism?: Beyond Meat and Memes

The avoidance of animal products has moved closer to the centre of mainstream culture, with significant participation in "Veganuary" and an increase in availability of plant-based alternatives to animal products in supermarkets in recent years.

But consumption of these products has become increasingly politicised. People have suggested that vegan diets are unhealthy due to the perceived difficulty of getting some nutrients. Others have highlighted the damaging impact on the livelihoods of farmers resulting from reduction in consumption of animal products.

Some universities, student unitions, councils, businesses, football clubs and other organisations have transitioned to mostly or fully vegan menus, drawing both praise and criticism for lack of choice.

Social media has been a key area for such debates with a proliferation of vegan and plant-based accounts, influencers, and hashtags, however, more academic work is needed especially in the use of image and video.

Social media accounts promoting veganism, whether run by individuals or organisations, have different aims, motivations, and tactics for recruiting followers or spreading their messages. But all have a potentially significant influence on how the vegan movement is understood and how related practices are encouraged and spread.

To investigate this we collected posts during "Veganuary" (January) 2024 by monitoring various related hashtags (eg. #veganuary, #plantbased). We are applying a form of "multimodal critical discourse analysis" to these posts - meaning that we have been looking at the ways in which ideas, messages and general perceptions of the world are articulated, constructed, and communicated. We are exploring questions such as; how is veganism presented as positive, normal and desirable? How are animal consumption and exploitation practices constructed as negative, strange, and undesirable?

We are also interested in how the "affordances" of the platforms are used to spread the messages. To do this we are looking at what kinds of images are used, how hashtags and viral trends jumped on to spread particular messages and how likes and shares are encouraged?

Traditional discourse analysis focuses principally on text. Multimodal discourse analysis, as used in our project, also looks at image, video, and sounds. This requires different kinds of knowledge and research skills. Provisional analysis has shown that vegan posts tend to subvert expectations by presenting "farm" animals in emotional and caring relationships with other animals and with humans. This is used to blur the distinction between "farm" and "domestic" animals.

We are also finding that certain forms of "positive" lighting and composition tend to be used in images and videos when representing caring relationships with and between animals. These are contrasted with “negative” lighting in posts presenting critical representations of farms and their practices.

Ultimately, discourse analysis of this kind is an attempt to see how perceptions of how the world is - or should be - are articulated, communicated, and promoted. We hope that this project will help us to understand how sometimes seemingly banal or inconsequential choices of words, images (and their composition) and music (or other sounds) are used to frame profound and meaningful debates over issues like veganism - and ultimately influence how people live their lives.