Most tweets about obesity on Twitter carry negative sentiment
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Key takeaways:
- About 73% of tweets regarding obesity from 2019 to 2021 had negative sentiments.
- Tweets about obesity commonly revolved around body shaming, COVID-19 and racism.
More than 70% of posts on Twitter discussing obesity from 2019 to 2021 were deemed as being predominantly negative, according to data presented at the European Congress on Obesity.
In an analysis of more than 25,000 tweets discussing obesity, the vast majority of posts discussed obesity in a negative light, with common themes revolving around body shaming, COVID-19 and racism.
“Our results clearly show that there is much to be done to fight against obesity-related stigma and negative perceptions of people living with obesity that are highly prevalent on social media platforms such as Twitter,” Jorge Correia, MD, MSc, clinic director in the division of endocrinology, diabetes, nutrition and therapeutic patient education, unit of therapeutic patient education at the WHO Collaborating Center at University Hospitals of Geneva and University of Geneva, told Healio. “In particular, politicians and celebrities should be more mindful of the way they speak about this topic, because their posts have an important impact on shaping attitudes and perceptions of their followers.”
Correia and colleagues analyzed a dataset of tweets posted on Twitter from 2019 to 2021 that referred to obesity. Data were extracted from the Twitter application programming interface and analysis of the tweets was conducted in Python. Sentiment analysis was run on an XLM-R base model trained on about 198 million multilingual tweets to determine positive, neutral or negative sentiments. Researchers used topic modeling to create clusters of interpretable topics among the posts.
Researchers found 25,580 tweets regarding obesity during the study period. The number of tweets about obesity increased from 11,841 in 2020 to 12,775 in 2021. In sentiment analysis, 72.97% of the tweets were deemed to be negative, 18.78% were neutral and 8.25% were positive. Researchers observed spikes in tweets during events when politicians discussed obesity.
There were 243 parsimonious clusters found during topic modeling. Among the clusters emerged several themes. One of the biggest themes revolved around body shaming and negative tweets regarding body positivity and fat acceptance. Another major theme was COVID-19 and obesity, with some tweets discussing how most people with severe COVID-19 also had obesity. Another major theme involved racism, with some tweets making disparaging comments on high obesity rates among historically underrepresented groups. Other themes identified in topic modeling included childhood obesity, COVID-19 vaccination, smoking, illicit substance use, alcohol consumption, environmental risk factors for obesity, polycystic ovary syndrome and surgical treatments.
“We hope that our findings will help raise awareness regarding the negative tone that prevails on social media platforms regarding obesity, that is oftentimes knowingly or unknowingly exacerbated by celebrities,” Correia said. “We believe that this study will help better understand the sentiments and attitudes of the general population regarding obesity. This can help guide future health policies and interventions. But there is still much to be done to counterweigh bias on social media.”
Correia said future studies must be conducted to examine the burden and impact of negative social media posts regarding obesity on the general population to develop interventions.
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Correia JC, et al. PO2.126. Presented at: European Congress on Obesity; May 17-20, 2023; Dublin.
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