Mining and mapping halal food consumers: A geo-located Twitter opinion polarity analysis

Similar to other religious behaviors, food consumption represents a hard-to-fake symbol of spirituality. The halal food market has recently witnessed a significant growth, especially in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South America. Although social media has become a valuable source for studying the dynamics of consumer opinion, no previous studies have attempted to investigate sentiments toward halal food expressed on social media. This study fills this gap through the analysis of a random sample of 100,000 tweets dealing with halal food. To conduct the analysis, an expert-predefined lexicon of seed adjectives was used. Descriptive analysis detected a generally positive sentiment toward halal food, whereas geo-located Twitter maps showed that “religious diaspora” extensively uses digital posts to communicate about halal food. By analyzing halal food opinions expressed on social media, this research adds breadth and depth to the debate over such an underrepresented area.