ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on tweets that link food, eating and diabetes, and considers what results can tell people about the use of Twitter as a platform for food activism. It introduces Twitter and explains why its content relating to diabetes and user interactions. The chapter presents the result of an iterative process of collaborative research between applied mathematicians and anthropologists. Quantitative approaches to investigating Twitter offer a different perspective on influence, power and authority. Analysis carried out for studies relating to Twitter and health tends to filter out content such as chatter or jokes – often about food – that the researchers view as 'noise' and 'irrelevant' to health research. Twitter's marketing material emphasises the platform's importance as a global, real-time public information source; providing information about health management and diet is no exception. Authorities tend to push out information of their own, but they retweet messages by other authoritative sources of information far less frequently.
