The sociomoral construction of the dairy industry on social media

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this work, we describe how dairy production is framed and communicated both by dairy producers and opponents of dairy farming through popular social media messaging. We built a specialized corpus of Twitter posts made by pro-dairy industry insiders (N = 3,350) and compared it with a second specialized corpus of anti-dairy posts (N = 4,811). Posts were harvested using web-scraping tools, and corpus techniques were applied to identify keywords. The keywords were then placed into semantic clusters, e.g. moral judgments and community, through a process of qualitative investigation with close concordance analysis. We report important differences in the way each group linguistically instantiates social and moral values to produce differentially moralized evaluations of farming as well as asymmetrical discursive construals of ingroup loyalty, profit, and motherhood. These differences reflect how each interest group strategically amplifies or downplays moral considerations implicit in animal agriculture and ultimately how they legitimize and/or challenge farmed animal suffering.