A comparison and analysis of the Twitter discourse related to weight loss and fitness

Abstract

More than 30% of the world population is concerned with the problem of overweight. Social media can play a role in human health by offering them correct food patterns and increasing their awareness about different features of appropriate food and diet. Several researches have been carried out on context analysis of social network messages, but there is a paucity of literature on analysis of feelings in tweets and their different geographical locations. This study aims at understanding tweets stated on the amount of reception shown by people in the course of weight loss in a period of 1 month. This study uses cross-sectional and descriptive method to analyze over 2,684,858 of tweets quantitatively. It also compares the emotional aspects present in the tweets. Users, who are active in this domain, are classified into six classes. An investigation and comparison of the number of activities with relation to weight loss has been carried out by searching users’ geographical information of social networks in different continents. English tweets have been chosen because of the generality of the English language. After reviewing the previous literature and the results of the analysis on these tweets, using the MALLET software, six classifications were considered for the tweets. The results show that there is a meaningful relation among the extracted parameters in the research.