Global halal food discourse on social media: a text mining approach

ABSTRACT

No previous studies have explored the distinct role played by halal food discourse on social media. This study fills this research gap by investigating the structure, dynamics and sentiments related to halal food tweets using methods borrowed from text mining and social network analytics. Based on sample of 11,700 world-wide random tweets, we used both the NRC and the AFINN lexicons to gauge worldwide sentiments towards halal food. Although results show a generally positive sentiment, the tweets also reflect a general concern about animal welfare. Community detection techniques revealed a strong homophily effect among different halal food communities. This effect occurs when actors in an environment similar to a virtual room deal with topics of common interest or discuss common agenda. Our findings hold important implications for different stakeholders as they underscore the relational nature of halal food networks and the importance of the strategic management of social media as a critical communication tool.

KEYWORDS:

• Halal food
• social media
• Twitter
• sentiment analysis
• topic modelling

Acknowledgement

This article draws heavily on Mostafa (2013a,b), Mostafa (2018) and Mostafa (2019).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mohamed M. Mostafa has received a PhD in Business from the Manchester Business School, the University of Manchester, UK. He has also earned a MS in Applied Statistics from the University of Northern Colorado, USA, a MA in French Language and Civilization from Middlebury College, USA, a MA in Social Science Data Analysis from Essex University, UK, a MA in Translation Studies from Portsmouth University, UK, a MSc in Functional Neuroimaging from Brunel University, UK and a MS in Affective Neuroscience from the University of Maastricht/the University of Florence. He was employed at universities in the USA, Portugal, Egypt, Cyprus, Turkey, France, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Currently, he works as a Full Professor at GUST, Kuwait. He has published over 90 research papers in several leading academic peer reviewed journals, including Economic Modeling, Social Indicators Research, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, Expert Systems with Applications, Sustainable Development, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Social Network Analysis & Mining, International Journal of Intelligent Computing & Cybernetics, Neural Computing and Applications, Psychology & Marketing, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of Promotion Management, Journal of Marketing Communications, International Journal of Consumer Studies, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Tourism Review, Health Marketing Quarterly, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education, Journal of International Consumer Marketing. He has also presented numerous papers at professional conferences worldwide.